ArticlePeerJ2018
A short, robust brain activation control task optimised for pharmacological fMRI studies.
Article in PeerJ, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 12 citations in OpenAlex.
- Melanocortin 4 receptor agonism enhances sexual brain processing in women with hypoactive sexual desire disorder.The Journal of clinical investigation · 2022Trial
- Trauma Timing and Its Impact on Brain Activation During Flexible Emotion Regulation in PTSD: Insights From Functional MRI.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- The Role of fMRI in Drug Development: An Update.Advances in neurobiology · 2023Article
- Educational fMRI: From the Lab to the Classroom.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Review
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundFunctional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a popular method for examining pharmacological effects on the brain; however, the BOLD response is dependent on intact neurovascular coupling, and potentially modulated by a number of physiological factors. Pharmacological fMRI is therefore vulnerable to confounding effects of pharmacological probes on general physiology or neurovascular coupling. Controlling for such non-specific effects in pharmacological fMRI studies is therefore an important consideration, and there is an additional need for well-validated fMRI task paradigms that could be used to control for such effects, or for general testing purposes.
methodsWe have developed two variants of a standardized control task that are short (5 minutes duration) simple (for both the subject and experimenter), widely applicable, and yield a number of readouts in a spatially diverse set of brain networks. The tasks consist of four functionally discrete three-second trial types (plus additional null trials) and contain visual, auditory, motor and cognitive (eye-movements, and working memory tasks in the two task variants) stimuli. Performance of the tasks was assessed in a group of 15 subjects scanned on two separate occasions, with test-retest reliability explicitly assessed using intra-class correlation coefficients.
resultsBoth tasks produced robust patterns of brain activation in the expected brain regions, and region of interest-derived reliability coefficients for the tasks were generally high, with four out of eight task conditions rated as 'excellent' or 'good', and only one out of eight rated as 'poor'. Median values in the voxel-wise reliability measures were also >0.7 for all task conditions, and therefore classed as 'excellent' or 'good'. The spatial concordance between the most highly activated voxels and those with the highest reliability coefficients was greater for the sensory (auditory, visual) conditions than the other (motor, cognitive) conditions. DISCUSSION: Either of the two task variants would be suitable for use as a control task in future pharmacological fMRI studies or for any other investigation where a short, reliable, basic task paradigm is required. Stimulus code is available online for re-use by the scientific community.
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