Cognitive Modes Detectable with Task-Based fMRI

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a non-invasive neuroimaging technique, primarily utilized to map the spatiotemporal distribution and patterns of underlying brain activity. Since its invention 30 years ago, fMRI has had remarkable academic and cultural influence. Touted for its excellent spatial resolution, fMRI has made an impact in both cognitive and clinical neuroscience. By providing a detailed map of active areas during tasks or rest, fMRI can aid researchers and clinicians in studying brain function in both healthy and diseased states, or to provide the required evidence to select target regions used in brain stimulation treatment. Substantial research funding has already been committed to years of data collection (>>$100,000 scanner costs for a sample of 200 subjects), and the recent emergence of accessible fMRI databanks is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. For this edited book, we start by precisely defining the reliable spatial information characteristic of the task-induced blood oxygenation level-dependent signal (BOLD) changes representative of cognitive modes, even providing doodles that can be used as a way to efficiently communicate the precise configuration of hundreds or thousands of voxels, an alternative to the cumbersome traditional coordinate-based labelling methodology. describe determine the presence of a specific anatomical pattern. However, the main thrust of each chapter is to determine the cognitive function leading to these BOLD configurations by statistically testing and interpreting how the task-induced BOLD changes take place in the trial and differ between task and task conditions. The cognitive modes approach reduces the risk of reverse inference errors by working towards a one-to one mapping between spatial patterns and cognitive function. For each mode, our goals were to: (1) demonstrate the replicability of the mode and its associated anatomical patterns, and (2) provide evidence for the cognitive functions underpinning the mode by way of inspection of the task-induced BOLD signal temporal changes over a range of fMRI tasks. The Supplementary Material contains further analysis of the cognitive modes anatomical patterns.