How Scientists Are Tackling Brain Imaging’s Replication Problem

Researchers who spoke with Spectrum say that while brain imaging tools have their limitations, they still hold promise in helping to unlock the brain’s secrets.

Written byAngie Voyles Askham and Spectrum
| 7 min read
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Whole-brain activation and reliability maps for task-functional MRI measures
REPUBLISHED WITH PERMISSION, PSYCHOL SCI, DOI:10.1177/0956797620916786, 2020

When Maxwell Elliott’s latest research paper began making the rounds on Twitter last June, he wasn’t sure how he felt.

Elliott, a graduate student in clinical psychology in Ahmad Hariri’s lab at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, studies functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and how it can be used to better understand neurological conditions such as dementia and autism.

He was excited that this “nitty-gritty” aspect of the field, as he describes it, was garnering a bit more attention, but the reason for the buzz disappointed him: A news outlet had picked up the story and run it with an overstated headline: “Duke University researchers say every brain activity study you’ve ever read is wrong.”

“They seemed to just totally misunderstand it,” Elliott says.

His study, published in Psychological Science, did not discount 30 ...

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