Hi Iris-Katharina
Re:
>dear dr price,
>
>as a neuropsychologist i'm as well interested in the functional brain
>architecture of patients compared to healthy controls. in your article
>"scanning patients with tasks they can perform" you propose a model which
>helps to understand fMRI-data in patients. what would you propose for
>patients who perform badly on a cognitive task but who show at the same
>time exactly the same brain activation as controls?
>would you then assume that each brain region alone is still responsive but
>that the interconnectivity to solve the task got lost?
Disrupted interconnectivity may be one possible explanation for normal
physiological responses when the behaviour is abnormal. However, you can
not "assume" this because your experiment was not designed to test
connectivity. It may simply be the case that you do not have sufficient
experimental power to demonstrate abnormal activation. To explore your
data further, you could correlate RTs with activation in the patients and
normals separately and test for a group by correlation interaction.
Best wishes
Cathy Price
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