Many papers doing univariate fMRI analyses start describing their list of significant clusters with phrases like "A widely-distributed network of areas was activated for this contrast, including (...)".

I am, however, wondering whether the use of the term "network" is correct, given that (it seems to me) this implies that there is connectivity between those areas of the network, and consequently that some of those areas would not make sense to be activated in isolation, without the others. It seems to me that a simple univariate analysis cannot give this information, and I am wondering if it is true that it is only functional connectivity and multivariate (MVPA) analyses (or maybe yet other types of analyses?) that would truly be able to say that a bunch of regions that show up for some contrast represent a "network".