Nothing jumps out as being horribly wrong with the image. The frontal cortex looks like it extends beyond the mask, but the rest of the brain looks fine. As you mentioned that you used FSL for normalization, I would ask the normalization question on their list.

I would have expected more activation in the primary cortex of the modality being stimulated as you are comparing the task to rest.

Best Regards, Donald McLaren
=================
D.G. McLaren, Ph.D.
Research Fellow, Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital and
Harvard Medical School
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, GRECC, Bedford VA
Website: http://www.martinos.org/~mclaren
Office: (773) 406-2464
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On Fri, Jun 12, 2015 at 8:28 AM, Joelle Zimmermann <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Hi All - I've ran a simple SPM analysis, and I notice that in the outputted plots of the brains (please see attached), the dark dots (representing activations) appear to be outside the edges of the brain. I'm assuming this is not okay?

My suspicion is that this is because the normalization was not done well. Please also see the second attachment, which is the standard MNI template (in red-yellow), overlaid over the normalized 4D functional image.

Thanks,
Joelle