The early origins and the growing popularity of the individual-subject analytic approach in human neuroscience

• Main Author: Fedorenko, Evelina (Author)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier BV, 2021-12-09T19:34:40Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

 In the last three decades, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has transformed the field of cognitive neuroscience. A standard analytic approach entails aligning a set of individual activation maps in a common brain space, performing a statistical test in each voxel, and interpreting significant activation clusters with respect to macroanatomic landmarks. In the last several years, however, this group-analytic approach is being increasingly replaced by analyses where neural responses are examined within each brain individually. In this opinion piece, I trace the origins of individual-subject analyses in human neuroscience and speculate on why group analyses had risen vastly in popularity during the 2000s. I then discuss a core problem with group analyses - their limited utility in informing the human cognitive architecture - and talk about how the individual-subject functional localization approach solves this problem. Finally, I discuss other reasons for why researchers have been turning to individual-subject analyses, and argue that such approaches are likely to be the future of human neuroscience.