Head Movement Is Bad News For Neuroscience (Again)

Claims that children with autism have abnormal brain white matter connections may just reflect the fact that they move about more during their MRI scans. So say a team of Harvard and MIT neuroscientists, including Nancy "Voodoo Correlations" Kanwisher, in a new paper: Spurious group differences due to head motion in a diffusion MRI study. Essentially, the authors show how head movement during a diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) scan causes apparant differences in the integrity of white matter tracts, like these ones: