fMRI Flashcards
What does BOLD stand for
Blood-Oxygen-Level-Dependent (imaging)… you measure the BOLD signal within a region
Can you compare brain regions using fMRI
Nope
Which brain region has been more successful mapped with fRMI
Visual (cause we know a fair bit about it)
What did Kanwisher look at (1997)
Faces! Contrasted with objects
Where did Kanwisher (1997) find activation for faces but not objects (or scrambled faces or hours or hands)
Fusiform gyrus (Fusiform Face Area, FFA)
Which brain region for ‘houses and plces’
Parahippocampal Place Area (PPA)
Which brain region for bodies
Extrastriate Body Part Area (EBA)
Who ran the critical alternative experiment to counter Kawisher’s Fusiform Face Area (FFA) thing? (about expertise)
Gauthier (1999)
What was Gauthier’s alternative hypothesis?
That it was an expertise area, and we just happen to be expert at faces…
Who ran the alternative hypothesis about visual field stuff… in relation to the FFA
Malach (2002)
What did Malach (2002) argue in relation to the FFA
It could be about ‘cortical topography’ ie eccentricity mapping, therefore coding is defined by ‘resolution needs’… ie FFA is good for everything that requires ‘high resolution ‘
What is ‘reverse inference’
In the context of fMRI, when an area of the brain is activated, we assume it is involved (potentially exclusively) in the cognitive processes
What did Poldrack (2006) argue
that the reverse inference thing creates problems… the probability that we really learn from our fMRI results that cognitive process X i involved depends on:
- quality of the task to measure the cognitive process
- specificity of the region for this cognitive process
What did Badre & D’Esposito (2009) do?
Mapped the pre-frontal cortex
What was Duncan’s argument (2001, 2010, 2013) (hint: specificity)
The frontal cortex is involved in tons of tasks relative but not absolute specialisation.. and that this was the same for other brain regions… he called it the ‘multi-demand network’.
What does it mean to over interpret null results
To assume that a brain region is NOT involved in a process simply because it didn’t show up on the scan…
What did Coltheart (2005) argue
Neuroimaging has taught us nothing! (So far)
Which neuro-imaging system would you use if you wanted to understand… where in the brain something happens
fMRI
Which neuro-imaging system would you use if you wanted to understand… fast paced differences in processing
EEG
Which neuro-imaging system would you use if you wanted to understand… causality
TMS (neural noise)
