PI Name: Michael Miller
Institution: University of California, Santa Barbara

Abstract:

We have previously shown that the pattern of activations represented by the group map looked very different from the patterns of activations for the individuals making up that group. The individual differences went well beyond any differences in anatomy not corrected by spatial normalization. Further, despite large variations from subject to subject, we found that the individual patterns of activations were stable over an extended period of time, suggesting that the variations in active brain regions between individuals were systematic and not due to random noise. These findings imply that the group map is not necessarily a meaningful representation of the brain activity observed at the individual level.