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fmri-for-beginners

A course designed for anyone entering the field of fMRI-based cognitive neuroscience. It covers both the theory behind how we analyze the data and technical skills/knowledge to apply right away. This course is designed for those who are new to the field, but contains useful resources for all skill levels.

Introduction To fMRI Analysis Programs

So depending on how much of the theory part you’ve gone through, you’ll know that there are several different ways to analyze fMRI data. It largely depends on your research question, study design, and to an extent, personal preference. While it would be a great time to go through all of the different analyses and programs, what I am going to do instead is list a few programs that I am familiar with along with a brief introduction to them. Many of these programs do the same thing in slightly different ways, so certain aspects of each program may be considered “better” for certain processing or analysis steps. There is also the personal preference of the research group/institution that plays a big role in which program is used.

So you may be thinking: What now? You just listed these programs rather vaguely? And to satisfy your curiosity, here is the holy grail of neuroimaging, Andy’s Brain Book. This website has several incredibly helpful, easy-to-follow tutorials on using various neuroimaging analysis programs. Below, I will link the tutorials for the aforementioned programs(which are just the ones that I am personally most familiar with, there are many others out there that are also very useful) so that you can familiarize yourself with how to use them.

Troubleshooting

It is an *unavoidable fact* that you will run into errors/problems when trying to use these programs. Some of them will be small mistakes on your end, some will be due to different operating systems, and some will remain a mystery until the end of time. Regardless of the problem’s origin, it is important to know how to solve these problems on your own. Andy’s Brain Book is always a good place to start, but when that fails:

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