Psychology I / Brain Imaging Techniques
Practice question · Multiple choice

A famous demonstration found significant fMRI activation in the brain of a dead salmon shown photographs. What was the point being made?

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  1. How many separate statistical tests does a whole-brain fMRI analysis involve?
  2. The salmon is dead. So whatever the analysis found, where did it come from?
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D. That with tens of thousands of voxels, some pass 0.05 by chance.

Why

Bennett and colleagues ran an ordinary uncorrected analysis on a dead salmon and found significant voxels in its brain cavity, nothing was malfunctioning. Tens of thousands of independent tests at alpha 0.05 guarantee a cluster somewhere. It changed practice quickly, largely because a dead fish is harder to ignore than a formula.

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