Experimental Design

Abstract

Non-invasive functional neuroimaging techniques enable researchers to study the neurobiological substrates of psychological processes. The increasingly large body of neuroimaging research has two fundamental purposes. The first is to identify the brain regions that underlie a particular psychological process while the second seeks to identify differential responses of these regions to various stimuli or task challenges. The latter focus yields insights into both how the brain accommodates varying task demands and how differences between individuals or between clinical and healthy comparison groups might be explained by differences in neurobiological functioning. To achieve these goals, it is essential that one be able to isolate the psychological process of interest and how best to do so, with particular regard to experimental design, is the focus of this chapter. Part II will describe issues particular to psychological experimental design, that is, experimental control over the cognitive or emotional process of interest. Part III focuses on data analysis with emphasis on optimizing and isolating the neuroimaging signal in the activated brain regions. Part III also addresses a number of practical matters that confront all researchers when designing their experiments.