fMRI: Imaging of the Human Brain at Work

1.1 – Nancy Tells a Story to Introduce her New Course: The Human Brain [updated 2019]

[Video has been updated from Spring 2019 class] Dear Viewers of these Videos- These lectures are from my undergrad course The Human Brain, currently being taught in the spring of 2018 at MIT. Lectures will be added as the course proceeds.…
Carvalho-Heineken Talk at Cog Sci 2019: Functional Imaging of the Human Brain: A Window
What is fMRI?

The bare basics on functional MRI, a noninvasive method for measuring neural activity in the human brain with (almost) millimeter resolution. Related Videos Watch Nancy’s brain get zapped with transcranial magnetic stimulation Explaining a very simple fMRI experiment Watch a very simple…
Explaining a very simple fMRI experiment

The bare bones of the design and analysis of a very simple fMRI experiment, and some basic terminology. Related Videos Watch a very simple fMRI experiment Discovering a face specific region with fMRI A few tips for critically evaluating fMRI studies
Watch a very simple fMRI experiment

Watch my lab tech Jenelle Feather scan me on that very simple experiment while course TA (and MIT graduate student) Hilary Richardson narrates. Related Videos Discovering a face specific region with fMRI Explaining a very simple fMRI experiment
Discovering a face specific region with fMRI

Here I describe the basic fMRI evidence for the fusiform face area, how we test alternative hypotheses to face specificity, and the functional region of interest method. Related Videos What happens when you stimulate the face area? An important challenge to the…
An important challenge to the specificity of the fusiform face area

In a paper published in 2001 Jim Haxby made the important point that a region of the brain can contain information about classes of stimuli that it does not respond to above baseline, if the pattern of response across voxels in that…
Why Use Functional Regions of Interest (fROIs)?

Nancy discusses how we can use fROIs to explore human cognition, and why it provides unique advantages over other functional imaging methods.
Functionally Characterizing Regions with Response Profiles

How do we figure out not just what a region likes (i.e., responds to most), but what it does? One way is to measure its response to a lot of other kinds of stimuli, that is measure its “response profile”. Related Videos…
Functional MRI adaptation

How can we tell what information is represented in each voxel or region? Even if the mean response of the voxel is the same to the two kinds of stimuli, different neural populations in the voxel may respond to the two stimuli,…
Multiple Voxel Pattern Analysis

Multiple voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) is the other method (besdies fMRI adaptation) that enables us to figure out what information is repesented in a given region. If the pattern of response across voxels in that region is stably different for one kind…
A few tips for critically evaluating fMRI studies

Here I give a few tips for evaluating published fMRI studies by pointing out three common flaws in imaging studies. Related Videos Discovering a face specific region with fMRI Explaining a very simple fMRIexperiment What is fMRI?