This is pretty close to my background. The article is fairly dramatically written. It’s not as if nobody has been looking at reliability and discriminability until now. It’s a big topic in the field with both task and rest fMRI.
There is a big spread in the quality of work in the field. From thoughtful analyses of large datasets, to pretty bad examples of p-hackery with push-button software.
A root cause of problems is people asking scientific questions of fMRI data whose answers would lie at a much finer spatiotemporal resolution than the medium can support.
>> A root cause of problems is people asking scientific questions of fMRI data whose answers would lie at a much finer spatiotemporal resolution than the medium can support.
Reminds me of the "mirror neurons" nonsense from a while back.
I am as well, and I had similar thoughts about the article's flare for the dramatic.
And yes, most researchers realize that fMRI can find average difference fairly reliabily but test retest cross correlations are poor. We'd all love if we can improve imaging methods, but we work with what we got.
