Influence of sample size and analytic approach on stability and interpretation of brain‐behavior correlations in task‐related <scp>fMRI</scp> data
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Limited statistical power due to small sample sizes is a problem in fMRI research. Most of the work to date has examined the impact of sample size on task-related activation, with less attention paid to the influence of sample size on brain-behavior correlations, especially in actual experimental fMRI data. We addressed this issue using two large data sets (a working memory task, N = 171, and a relational processing task, N = 865) and both univariate and multivariate approaches to voxel-wise correlations. We created subsamples of different sizes and calculated correlations between task-related activity at each voxel and task performance. Across both data sets the magnitude of the brain-behavior correlations decreased and similarity across spatial maps increased with larger sample sizes. The multivariate technique identified more extensive correlated areas and more similarity across spatial maps, suggesting that a multivariate approach would provide a consistent advantage over univariate approaches in the stability of brain-behavior correlations. In addition, the multivariate analyses showed that a sample size of roughly 80 or more participants would be needed for stable estimates of correlation magnitude in these data sets. Importantly, a number of additional factors would likely influence the choice of sample size for assessing such correlations in any given experiment, including the cognitive task of interest and the amount of data collected per participant. Our results provide novel experimental evidence in two independent data sets that the sample size commonly used in fMRI studies of 20-30 participants is very unlikely to be sufficient for obtaining reproducible brain-behavior correlations, regardless of analytic approach.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.077 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it