fMRI researchers should care about (and report) the size of the effects that they study, according to a new Neuroimage paper from NIMH researchers Gang Chen and colleagues. It's called Is the statistic value all we should care about in neuroimaging?. The authors include Robert W. Cox, creator of the popular fMRI analysis software AFNI. Chen et al. explain the purpose of their paper:
Here we address an important issue that has been embedded within the neuroimaging community for a long time: the absence of effect estimates in results reporting in the literature.
The problem, they say, is that in studying brain activations, neuroscientists have been overly focussed on statistical significance. In a typical fMRI experiment, the researchers look for clusters (aka 'blobs') of brain activation, defined as areas where the observed activity is unlikely to have occured by chance (p < 0.05). These clusters then get reported (and colorfully ...
