The early origins and the growing popularity of the individual-subject analytic approach in human neuroscience

• Published in: Current opinion in behavioral sciences Vol. 40; pp. 105 - 112
• Main Author: Fedorenko, Evelina
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd 01.08.2021
• ISSN: 2352-1546; 2352-1554
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cobeha.2021.02.023

•Traditional fMRI group analyses are limited in their ability to inform the human cognitive architecture.•Functional localization helps establish a robust and cumulative research enterprise, and uncover dissociations in cognitive capacities.•The individual-subject analytic approach enables a wide variety of novel and exciting research questions, not possible with group analyses. In the last three decades, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has transformed the field of cognitive neuroscience. A standard analytic approach entails aligning a set of individual activation maps in a common brain space, performing a statistical test in each voxel, and interpreting significant activation clusters with respect to macroanatomic landmarks. In the last several years, however, this group-analytic approach is being increasingly replaced by analyses where neural responses are examined within each brain individually. In this opinion piece, I trace the origins of individual-subject analyses in human neuroscience and speculate on why group analyses had risen vastly in popularity during the 2000s. I then discuss a core problem with group analyses — their limited utility in informing the human cognitive architecture — and talk about how the individual-subject functional localization approach solves this problem. Finally, I discuss other reasons for why researchers have been turning to individual-subject analyses, and argue that such approaches are likely to be the future of human neuroscience.