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fMRI Gets Slap in the Face with a Dead Fish

Bennett et al. argue for the importance of multiple comparisons correction in fMRI studies through humorous research on a dead fish.

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A reader drew my attention to this gem from Craig Bennett, who blogs at prefrontal.org:

Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: An argument for multiple comparisons correctio

fishfmri

This is a poster presented by Bennett and colleagues at this year’s Human Brain Mapping conference. It’s about fMRI scanning on a dead fish, specifically a salmon. They put the salmon in an MRI scanner and “the salmon was shown a series of photographs depicting human individuals in social situations. The salmon was asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing.”

I’d say that this research was justified on comedic grounds alone, but they were also making an important scientific point. The (fish-)bone of contention here is multiple comparisons correction. The “multiple comparisons problem” is simply the fact that if you do a lot of different statistical tests, some of them ...

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