Simon Eickhoff, Forschungszentrum Juelich

Meta-analytic approaches to mapping the brain, its connections and functions

Whereas the potential inference from any single neuroimaging study is limited to method-inherent drawbacks, the high degree of standardization in neuroimaging research allows to pooling and integration of activation results from several thousands of experiments. Moreover, several large-scale databases of neuroimaging results have emerged over the last years, that compile this wealth of information. In this talk, I would like to outline, how emerging meta-analytic tools may be use to draw on these resources and provide new insights into several aspects pertaining to the organization of the human brain: i) The localizationof brain functionsand its relationship to task-specific confounds, ii) the functional roles underlying, e.g., morphometric, findings, including formal inference for functional decoding, iii) the identification of functional connectivity in a task-based state through the mapping of co-activations, iv) how these may complement information on connectivity in the unconstrained, endogeneously driven task-free "resting" state and v) the delineation of cortical modules by data-driven clustering of co-activation patterns, which, in combination with the other described methods described in this talk, entails the possibility for functional brain mapping and atlasing.

Additional Information

Colloquium Talk of the GRK "Sensory Computation in Neural Systems"

Organized by

Joram Soch / John-Dylan Haynes