fMRI
Full course description
The primary goal is to provide hands-on experience in experimental design, acquisition and analysis of fMRI experiments. In the first tutorial, each student group separately formulates an experimental question/hypothesis to be tested with fMRI and elaborates an appropriate experimental design. In a subsequent meeting, each group present to the other groups (in an oral presentation) its proposal for an fMRI study and all studies are discussed and evaluated; at the end of the meeting one study is selected.
In the group meetings and independent study, all students are involved in implementing the experimental set-up required for performing the selected study (e.g. selection and preparation of stimuli, implementation of the design) and participating in the fMRI measurements. In the last meetings, all students perform the statistical analysis of the datasets. Assistance and prior preparation, especially in the implementation stage (stimulus programming) and data analysis stage (preparation of data in usable format for analysis in Brain Voyager QX), is provided by the tutors. Finally, students describe and discuss their findings in an individually written report.
The final assessment for this course is pass or fail - and not a numerical grade between 0,0 and 10,0.
Course objectives
Students are able to understand and gain hands-on experience of:
- experimental design, hypothesis formulation, operationalization;
- fMRI blocked and event related designs;
- parameters for MRI scanning, MR safety and procedures, fMRI measurements;
- pre-processing fMRI data, statistical analysis fMRI data, results interpretation.