Biomedical subjects

Michael J M Honsberger

Publications and source records attributed to Michael J M Honsberger.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Spatial information is processed even when it is task-irrelevant: implications for neuroimaging task design.

Many neuroimaging studies have been designed to differentiate domain-specific processes in the brain. A common design constraint is to use identical stimuli for different domain-specific tasks. For example, an experiment investigating spatial versus identity processing would present compound spatial-identity stimuli in both spatial and identity tasks, and participants would be instructed to attend to, encode, maintain, or retrieve spatial information in the spatial task, and identity information in the identity task. An assumption in such studies is that spatial information will not be processed in the identity task, as it is irrelevant for that task. We report three experiments demonstrating violations of this assumption. Our results suggest that comparisons of spatial and identity tasks in existing neuroimaging studies have underestimated the amount of brain activation that is spatial-specific. For future neuroimaging studies, we recommend unique stimulus displays for each domain-specific task, and event-related measurement of post-stimulus processing.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

Task analysis complements neuroimaging: an example from working memory research.

When functional neuroimaging researchers draw conclusions about the sensory, cognitive, or motor processes that are associated with changes in brain activity, they are making assumptions about the component processes involved in performing a complex behavioral task. We demonstrate the danger in making such assumptions using, as an example, the n-back task, which has been widely used in neuroimaging studies of working memory. Neuroimaging researchers have assumed that the letter n-back task only engages processes involved in the short-term maintenance and manipulation of verbal information. We report three behavioral experiments demonstrating that the letter n-back task additionally recruits spatial processes. A fourth experiment suggested that the location n-back task may recruit verbal processes in addition to spatial processes. These results call into question conclusions that have been drawn about the neural basis of working memory. More broadly, our results demonstrate that task analysis is a vital partner of neuroimaging in the cognitive neuroscience enterprise.

Acoustic Stimulation↗