A new paper in PNAS has made waves. The article, called
Cluster failure: Why fMRI inferences for spatial extent have inflated false-positive rates,
comes from Swedish neuroscientists Anders Eklund, Tom Nichols, and Hans Knutsson. According to many of the headlines that greeted "Cluster failure", the paper is a devastating bombshell that could demolish the whole field of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI):
Bug in fMRI software calls 15 years of research into question (Wired) A bug in fMRI software could invalidate 15 years of brain research. This is huge. (ScienceAlert) New Research Suggests That Tens Of Thousands Of fMRI Brain Studies May Be Flawed (Motherboard)
So what's going on here, and is it really this serious? The first thing to note is that the story isn't really new. I've been covering Eklund et al.'s work on the false-positive issue since 2012 (1,2,3,4). Over that time, Eklund and his colleagues have ...
