Join us Friday, September 29th, 2023, at 1:00 PM ET for an exciting virtual talk by Dr. Dobromir Rahnev entitled:“Quantifying the idiosyncrasy of brain activations” as part of the activities of the Brain Space Initiative, co-sponsored by the Center for Translational Research in Neuroimaging and Data Science (TReNDS) and the Data Science Initiative, IEEE Signal Processing Society.
Quantifying the idiosyncrasy of brain activations
Research in neuroscience often assumes universal neural mechanisms, but increasing evidence points towards sizeable individual differences in brain activations. What remains unclear is the extent of the idiosyncrasy and whether different types of analyses are associated with different levels of idiosyncrasy. Here we develop a new method for addressing these questions. The method consists of computing the within-subject reliability and subject-to-group similarity of brain activations and submitting these values to a computational model that quantifies the relative strength of group- and subject-level factors. We apply this method to a perceptual decision-making task and find that activations related to trial-level task, reaction time (RT), and confidence are influenced equally strongly by group- and subject-level factors. However, for activations related to average RT or confidence in a block of trials, the subject-level factors can be up to 6 times more important than group-level factors. In all cases, group- and subject-level factors are dwarfed by a noise factor. Overall, our method allows for the quantification of group- and subject-level factors of brain activations and thus provides a more detailed understanding of the idiosyncrasy levels in brain activations.
Biosketch: Dr. Rahnev received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Columbia University in 2012. After completing a 3-year post-doctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley, he joined Georgia Tech in 2015 where he is currently Blanchard Early Career professor. His research focuses on perceptual decision making – the process of internally representing the available sensory information and making decisions on it. Dr. Rahnev uses a wide variety of methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), psychophysics, and computational modeling. Dr. Rahnev’s work appears in high-impact journals such as Behavioral and Brain Sciences, PNAS, Nature Communications, and Nature Human Behavior. He has received over $3.5M in funding, including PI grants from NIH, NSF, and the Office of Naval Research.
Recommended Article:
- J. Nakuci, J. Yeon, K. Xue, J.-H. Kim, S.-P. Kim, and D. Rahnev, "Quantifying the contribution of subject and group factors in brain activation," bioRxiv, p. 2022.08.01.502338, 2023. (Link to Paper)
Meeting information:
Meeting number: 2620 006 9700
Password: BTj5hXh38h9 (28554943 from phones and video systems)
https://gsumeetings.webex.com/gsumeetings/j.php?MTID=mf45a0b0142fd04a571dcf7b08c9609e7
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