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Hi all, I'm trying to design an auditory repetition-suppression study which will be done with ERP and fMRI (seperately, not at the same time!). The ERP is not a problem, we've done plenty of ERP studies before and the design is fine, but I'm struggling a bit with the fMRI design. We've been told that in order to get published we need to use sparse rather than continuous scanning (and that makes sense as a way of avoiding interference). Time is a major constraint; we only have a limited amount of funding for scanner time, so we need to have a design which collects as much useful data as possible in as short a session as possible (probably about 15 minutes per participant). But BOLD responses have a fairly long latency (peaking some time between 6 and 10 seconds after onset, according to the literature. We've found one study which does repetition-suppression using sparse scanning, and have a very short ISI, with the stimuli in random order,a nd repetitions taking place after several intervening stimuli, so I think we're going to use that as a template, but I'm really struggling to understand how the data would be analysed, given that the BOLD signal from each stimulus is going to be peaking during a later stimulus. Anyway, if that makes any sense to you, do you know of any good introductory sources for this kind of thing? I'm more of a psycholinguist than a neuroscientist at this point (although I'm keen to get more involved with the neuroscience side of things), and most of the papers and texts I've found assume a level of knowledge I don't have at the moment. Any pointers gratefully received! H