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Coherent spontaneous activity accounts for trial-to-trial variability in human evoked brain responses

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Abstract

Trial-to-trial variability in the blood oxygen level–dependent (BOLD) response of functional magnetic resonance imaging has been shown to be relevant to human perception and behavior, but the sources of this variability remain unknown. We demonstrate that coherent spontaneous fluctuations in human brain activity account for a significant fraction of the variability in measured event-related BOLD responses and that spontaneous and task-related activity are linearly superimposed in the human brain.

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Figure 1: Identification of regions of interest in the LMC and RMC for a single subject (subject 1).
Figure 2: Coherent spontaneous fluctuations account for a significant fraction of the variance in measured event-related responses.
Figure 3: Coherent spontaneous fluctuations and task-related responses are linearly superimposed.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the US National Institutes of Health grant NS06833.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Radiology, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, 63110, Missouri, USA

    Michael D Fox, Abraham Z Snyder, Jeffrey M Zacks & Marcus E Raichle

  2. Department of Neurology, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, 63110, Missouri, USA

    Abraham Z Snyder & Marcus E Raichle

  3. Department of Psychology, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, 63110, Missouri, USA

    Jeffrey M Zacks

  4. Departments of Anatomy and Neurobiology, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, 63110, Missouri, USA

    Marcus E Raichle

  5. Department of Biomedical Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, 63110, Missouri, USA

    Marcus E Raichle

Authors
  1. Michael D Fox
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  2. Abraham Z Snyder
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  3. Jeffrey M Zacks
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  4. Marcus E Raichle
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Correspondence to Michael D Fox.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Fig. 1

Reproduction of figure 2 from the article for each of the 14 subjects. (PDF 2423 kb)

Supplementary Table 1

Regional statistics for each subject (PDF 60 kb)

Supplementary Table 2

Changes in signal power, noise power, and signal/noise ratio for LMC event-related responses upon removal of RMC activity for each subject (PDF 52 kb)

Supplementary Table 3

Response magnitudes binned by activity in the right somatomotor cortex. (PDF 56 kb)

Supplementary Methods (PDF 122 kb)

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Fox, M., Snyder, A., Zacks, J. et al. Coherent spontaneous activity accounts for trial-to-trial variability in human evoked brain responses. Nat Neurosci 9, 23–25 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1616

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1616

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