Levels of alertness are closely linked with human behavior and cognition. However, while functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) allows for investigating whole-brain dynamics during behavior and task engagement, concurrent measures of alertness (such as EEG or pupillometry) are often unavailable. Here, we extract a continuous, time-resolved marker of alertness from fMRI data alone. We demonstrate that this fMRI alertness marker, calculated in a short pre-stimulus interval, captures trial-to-trial behavioral responses to incoming sensory stimuli. In addition, we find that the prediction of both EEG and behavioral responses during the task may be accomplished using only a small fraction of fMRI voxels. Furthermore, we observe that accounting for alertness appears to increase the statistical detection of task-activated brain areas. These findings have broad implications for augmenting a large body of existing datasets with information about ongoing arousal states, enriching fMRI studies of neural variability in health and disease.
fMRI-based detection of alertness predicts behavioral response variability
S. Goodale,Nafis Ahmed,Chong Zhao,J. D. de Zwart,P. Özbay,D. Picchioni,J. Duyn,Dario J. Englot,V. Morgan,Catie Chang
Published 2021 in eLife
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- Publication year
2021
- Venue
eLife
- Publication date
2021-05-07
- Fields of study
Biology, Medicine
- Identifiers
- External record
- Source metadata
Semantic Scholar, PubMed
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