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Dear SPM experts,

When conducting PPI with event-related designs, I've found that the
PPI regressors are dramatically affected by how trials are modeled,
i.e. either with a delta (duration = 0) or boxcar (duration = stimulus
offset minus onset) function. For example, the attached plots show PPI
regressors from identical seeds in identical designs, where the only
parameter varying is the use of a delta vs. boxcar function to model
the stimulation (trials varied in length from about 3-5 seconds). The
correlation between these regressors is only about .50. This seems
surprisingly low.

The reason I bring this up because, when one is merely concerned with
modeling the psychological response, the difference between modeling
trials as delta vs. boxcar functions is often small (although
certainly not insignificant; Grinband et al., 2008, NeuroImage).
However, this difference seems to be amplified when doing PPI with
event-related designs. Is this a reasonable conclusion?

Thanks in advance for any comments,
Bob

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Bob Spunt
Postdoctoral Fellow
Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab - www.scn.ucla.edu
Department of Psychology
University of California, Los Angeles