PSYC 5576 Methods in Human Brain Mapping

For over a century, human brain mapping has been conducted by correlating lesion location with impaired behavior. In the last two decades, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)--a noninvasive neuroimaging technique with excellent spatial resolution--has given rise to an explosion of knowledge regarding the role of specific brain regions in particular types of cognitive processing (such as shifting attention or memory retrieval). This course provides an in-depth examination of fMRI by reviewing the physical basis of the fMRI signal and its relation to neural activity in addition to considering issues of experimental design and data analysis.