Dear Marco,

The source reconstruction algorithm in SPM relies on certain assumptions that I suspect your data violates. As a result your data looks much like noise for the algorithm. I would suggest you to invert your two original conditions together rather than the difference and then export two images per subject and put them in paired t-test design. Furthermore, 20 ms is a very short window, depending on your sampling rate it can contain just a few samples. You should perhaps invert a much longer window especially if the peak you are interested in is quite prominent and then focus on your short window when summarizing your result as an image. Perhaps look at the multimodal face evoked responses tutorial in the manual and use that as the basis for your analysis.

Regarding noise covariance, in the Bayesian framework noise is whatever is not explained by your model (the residual) and it the essence of the inversion procedure to figure out what part of the data is noise and what is not.

Best,

Vladimir 



On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 3:25 PM, Marco Buiatti <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Dear SPM masters,

I am performing source reconstruction on the difference between two
ERPs using group inversion (20 subjects), standard reconstruction
parameters on a narrow temporal window (20 ms) on a well-known ERP
wave (N170). Standard MNI brain.

I have two questions:
1) Why do I have spurious reconstructions like the one attached
(source reconstruction on one subject, but this appears to be
relatively frequent in my analyses)? Is there a way to avoid such
artifacts?
2) A more general question. As far as I know, algorithms of
reconstruction of distributed sources use a noise covariance matrix
either on a baseline or on a separate set of data where no task
-related activation occurs. How does it work with SPM? Is this
computed implicitly somewhere or does it work differently? Since I am
computing a difference between ERPs, I expect results independent from
baseline correction. Am I right or does it influence the noise
covariance matrix? I could not find such information in the SPM
manual.

Thanks for your feedback,

Marco

--
Marco Buiatti, PhD

CEA/DSV/I2BM / NeuroSpin
INSERM U992 - Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit
Bât 145 - Point Courrier 156
Gif sur Yvette F-91191  FRANCE
Ph:  +33(0)169.08.65.21
Fax: +33(0)169.08.79.73
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
http://www.unicog.org/pm/pmwiki.php/Main/MarcoBuiatti

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