Blobs and Pitfalls: Challenges for fMRI Research

Brain scanning is big at the moment. In particular, the technique of functional MRI (fMRI) has become hugely popular within neuroscience. But now a group of big-name neuroimaging researchers, led by Russ Poldrack, have taken a skeptical look at the field, in a new preprint (currently under peer review) called Scanning the Horizon: Future challenges for neuroimaging research. Poldrack et al. do a great job of discussing the various problems including limited statistical power, undisclosed analytic flexibility (producing scope for p-hacking) and inflated false positive rates in the software tools used. They also cover proposed solutions including my favorite, preregistration of study designs. Neuroskeptic readers will find much of this familiar as I've covereda lot ofthese issues on this blog. The authors also offer some interesting new illustrations of the problems. I was particularly struck by the observation that out of a sample of 65 fMRI papers retreived from PubMed, ...