Lake Ontario Visionary Establishment Conference [LOVE]
February 11-12, Niagra Falls, NY Ontario, Canada

Cognitive Neuroscience Society Conference [CNS]
April 17-20, Montreal, Canada

Association for Psychological Science Convention [APS]
May 27-30, Boston, MA

Organization for Human Brain Mapping Conference [HBM]
June 6-10, Barcelona, Spain

Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics Conference [AHFE]
July 17-20, Miami, FL

Here is some of what I will be presenting:

[LOVE]
• Special topic talk: ‘Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: addressing the multiple comparisons problem in fMRI.’

[APS]
• Invited talk: ‘The development of interoceptive information processing across adolescence.’

[CNS] [HBM]
• Poster: ‘How reliable are the results from fMRI?’
Bennett CM, Guerin SA, Donovan CL, Miller MB

[HBM]
• Poster: ‘A device for simultaneous thermal and tactile stimulation in an MR environment.’
Bennett CM

It seems that late last week a few major neuroscience weblogs discovered the Salmon poster and decided to write up summaries. Those readers then posted to their weblogs, whose readers posted to their weblogs, and so on. By 10am Friday morning the prefrontal.org activity meter was pegged and my inbox was full.

A few important bits of info:
* The current status of the Salmon is that we are trying to publish it as an editorial in a major neuroimaging journal. We are very close to resubmitting, only needing to complete a survey on the prevalence of multiple comparisons correction in the previous neuroimaging literature. We hope that it will be released in the near future.
* If you would like to be sent a copy of the commentary if/when it becomes published just send me an email and I will put you on the list.
* Some sites have played up how difficult it has been for us to get the Salmon published. We have received some, well, interesting feedback by a few editors in the course of our submission. Still, it has not been more difficult than average to get the Salmon commentary published (so far).
* The goal of the Salmon poster was to encourage the minority of researchers who report uncorrected statistics to move forward and begin using basic multiple comparisons correction in their research. The Salmon doesn’t add anything to the technical discussion of how multiple comparisons correction is performed, it is simply a salient reminder of why proper correction is always necessary.
* None of the authors intended for the Salmon to go public in such a big way, especially before the commentary was reviewed and published. We were actually quite content to publish our editorial in a neuroimaging journal and be done with it. We feel that, fundamentally, this is an internal debate within the field of neuroimaging.

Some of the best/notable writeups that I have found:
* http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.com
* http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu
* http://lawandbiosciences.wordpress.com
* http://www.mindhacks.com
* http://www.wired.com
* http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience
* http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond
* http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/
* http://chronicle.com/
* http://slashdot.org

Some of the best comments that I have run across:

“The recorded signal is changing due to noise. The point of the experiment is that if you look at enough signals, the noise in one will match the timing of your experimental stimulus, purely out of chance. Another way of looking at it is this: if you choose a statistical threshold of p 0.05 then, statistically, you expect a result that is significant at that level purely out of chance once in every twenty experiments. When you’re analyzing images, or worse volumes, pixel by pixel, you’re doing a LOT of comparisons. If you don’t correct for that you WILL get false positives, no matter what you’re looking at.” – ceoyoyo

“But not everyone uses multiple comparisons correction. This is where the fish comes in – Bennett et al show that if you don’t use it, you can find “neural activation” even in the tiny brain of dead fish. Of course, with the appropriate correction, you don’t. There’s nothing original about this, except the colourful nature of the example – but many fMRI publications still report “uncorrected” results” – Neuroskeptic

“… it seems to me like that their point wasn’t that the fMRI wasn’t sensitive enough, or particular enough. Instead the problem seems to be a problem of statistically expected random noise. Their point seems to be that users of an fMRI should bear in mind that their marvelous magical machine can generate “real” errors, and that basic, common-sense multiple comparison habits should be developed, instead of a take a picture, slap a stat against it approach.” – Nemus

“The entire point the write up was to warn about the danger of false positives. Your attributing of brain activity to random, natural noise is exactly the danger they want to avoid.” – Anonymous

“The trouble is, most scientists are not mathematicians, and have no good theoretical understanding of statistics. Most people pushing buttons in SPSS or SAS (or what have you) are just doing “cargo cult” mathematics. Ask them to justify why their “very conservative” confidence interval for a given test is appropriate when dealing with eleventy billion variables, or why a particular post-hoc test is the proper one to use, and they’ll look at you like you just asked them to prove that the sky is blue.” – Anonymous

“Actually, the voodoo correlations paper is actually talking about performing correlations between the signals we get from fMRI scans (you can read the actual paper instead of the somewhat misleading article here [edvul.com]), and other measurements or scores. This doesn’t do that at all. This is about the danger of false positives in fMRI imaging, because of the large number of statistical tests that are done across the brain. The majority of peer reviewed published fMRI papers do some type of multiple comparisons correction to attempt to adjust for this problem.” – daenris

Some of the more terrible writeups that I have found:
By and large the comments have been quite good. However, there have been a few people arguing that the dead fish is actually still thinking or that we have observed evidence of the ethereal soul. I am not going to quote the comments here, but it has been a bit amusing to see this play out…

The funniest comments so far:

“Of course, Bennett’s group don’t mean to suggest that a post-mortem salmon is capable of perspective-taking. Cod forbid.”
- Kerri

No sir. What it proves is the existence of the sole.
-Jeremi

Yeah, the measurements were right off the scales.
- grcumb

Thank you… he’s here all week. Try the fish.
- theshowmecanuck

I’m wondering if the issue could be resolved if the salmon was smoked and served with cream cheese…
- G

No, what it proves is that while you can tune an fMRI, you can’t tuna fish.
- limekiller4

I would think that a salmon in an MRI would be thinking more along the lines of “HOLY FUCK! I CAN’T BREATHE!”
- geminidomino

Does the scientific method for biologists exclude barbeques?
- value_added

And I, for one, welcome our new zombie salmon overlords!!
- DarkOx

Why wasn’t this published? Maybe the reviewers considered the experiment a bit fishy …
- maxwell_demon

First, the fish wasn’t dead, it was just tenured.
- jesor

I demand that fMRI techniques get a fair herring!
- Bob O’H

Scream if you love the multiple comparisons problem! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!
- Jess

… compared with how Vul et al. handled a similar topic, this is a party with clowns and flowers
- powrogers

The joke possibilities are endless but I won’t bother. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.
- Anonymous

A common mistake made in discussions of taxonomy is overlooking the issue of whether closely related species taste the same. In this case, you omitted the fact that all of them are great when grilled. With a slice of lemon on the side.
- value_added

HOWEVER a fish that has been caught, killed/gutted, frozen, shipped, sold by auction, shipped again, sold again, taken to a hospital and put in an MRI machine is a dead fish. He ain’t pining for human faces, he has passed on. This fish is no more. He has ceased to be. He’s expired and gone to meet his maker. He’s a stuff. Bereft of life, he rests in filets! If you hadn’t glued him to his tank he’d be pushing up the seaweed. Its brainactivity is now history. He’s out of the pond. He’s kicked the tank, he’s shuffled of his mortal coil, run down the river and joined the bleeding choir invisibisble. This is an EX-SALMON!
- Anonymous

Conclusion
I just want to say that it has been great to see the discussion the Salmon has generated in the last few days. Our hope for this work was that it would call new attention to the multiple comparisons problem. I think that we can safely say that it has. Thanks.

~ Craig [Prefrontal].

[1] Human Brain Mapping 2009 – Presentations
http://prefrontal.org/blog/2009/06/human-brain-mapping-2009-presentations/

[2] Atlantic Salmon – MRI Data
http://prefrontal.org/blog/2009/07/atlantic-salmon-mri-data/

[3] The Story Behind the Atlantic Salmon
http://prefrontal.org/blog/2009/09/the-story-behind-the-atlantic-salmon/

[4] The Internet Found the Atlantic Salmon
http://prefrontal.org/blog/2009/09/the-internet-found-the-atlantic-salmon/

~Craig

Just got word that I was given a travel award for the Human Brain Mapping conference in June:
http://ric.uthscsa.edu:9000/TravelAwards/awardees.html

This year’s HBM conference is shaping up to be rather epic. I have two abstracts accepted for poster presentations, one of which was chosen for an oral presentation later that weekend. Now they are even giving me a few bucks to show up!

I have said it before, but HBM is by far my favorite conference of the year. I can’t wait.

Cognitive Neuroscience Society Conference [CNS]
March 21-24, San Francisco, California

New Horizons in Human Brain Imaging: A Focus on the Pacific Rim
April 13-15, Waikoloa, Hawaii

Organization for Human Brain Mapping Conference [HBM]
June 18-22, San Francisco, California

Conference on Neurocognitive Development
July 12-14, Berkeley, CA

Here are the titles of the posters I will be presenting:

[CNS]
• The impact of experimental design on the detection of individual variability in fMRI
Bennett CM, Guerin SA, Miller MB

[HBM]
• The processing of internally-generated interoceptive sensation (oral presentation)
Bennett CM, Baird AA

• Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: an argument for multiple comparisons correction
Bennett CM, Miller MB, Wolford GL

[1] Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience:
http://prefrontal.org/blog/2009/01/voodoo-correlations-in-social-neuroscience/

[2] The ‘Voodoo Correlations’ debate heats up
http://prefrontal.org/blog/2009/01/the-voodoo-correlations-debate-heats-up/

[3] The ‘Voodoo Correlations’ saga continues
http://prefrontal.org/blog/2009/01/the-voodoo-correlations-saga-continues/

[4] The Dangers of Double Dipping (Voodoo IV)
http://prefrontal.org/blog/2009/04/the-dangers-of-double-dipping-voodoo-iv/

[5] Voodoo Perspectives on Psychological Science
http://prefrontal.org/blog/2009/06/voodoo-perspectives-on-psychological-science/

~Craig

Politics on a weblog is like picking up a stick of old, wet dynamite.  You might grab it and absolutely nothing happens, or it might very well explode in your face.  It is for this reason that I try to avoid political discussion on prefrontal.org.  Every weblog must have a focus, and there are more than enough political blogs to go around.  Still, I am compelled to write just one post after the recent presidential election.  One post to say how much I have been desperately hoping for a new direction in our political system.  One post to tell you how much of that hope I have invested in one man.  One post to announce that I worked hard to help that man be successful.  One post, to tell you that he was in fact successful.

Congratulations, President-elect Barack Obama.

[Photo from Joe Raedle/Getty Images]

What is the goal for the second year? My primary goal is to post more often (2-3 times per week) and to aim for in-depth posts that take a bit more time to prepare. This will give the readers of this site additional material to peruse and gives me even more writing practice. The secondary goal is to continue filling in the quiet parts of the site, such as the ‘About’ and ‘Research’ pages. Who knows where this plan will take use 12 months from now, but if we can duplicate the success of the first year I will be more than happy.

Thanks for reading.

For most of July I have been in Lawrence, Kansas as an instructor for the KU Educational Talent Search summer camp ‘Discover Technology’. Talent Search is an educational opportunity program whose main goal is to shepherd students from underrepresented backgrounds though high school and encourage them to engage in post-secondary education. The Discover Technology summer camp is just one part of this year-round program.

I have been an instructor for Discover Technology for almost 10 years now. What brings me back year after year? Well, they pay me for my time, which is a plus. The biggest motivator though is that the course genuinely impacts the lives of the students. The graduation rate of most Kansas City, Kansas high schools is around 50% – Talent Search gets over 95% of their students through to their graduation. That is huge, and definitely worth a little time and effort on my part.

“The Integration of Higher Cognition and Internal State Across Development”
Bennett, CM. Doctoral Dissertation, Dartmouth College, 2008.
Bennett-Dissertation-2008.pdf

It is a large PDF file due to the numerous figures and tables included in the text. Keep in mind that the results and conclusions are still in a state of flux pending journal publication. Things may change quite a bit as each runs the gauntlet of the review process. Enjoy!

I have been a terrible author so far in 2008.  At least I have something to show for it though: a PhD.  Yes friends, the thesis defense is done.  I won’t even mention Sarah and I moving to California, starting a new postdoc at UCSB, and the birth of my godson Samuel.  So much has gone on that it will take a few entries to catch up. It has been a long dry spell since December. Still, know that I haven’t forgotten about the blog and that new entries are on the way…  ~Craig

Have you ever sat there and thought how your life would be much more complete if you could just learn more about interoceptive development? Well my friends, worry no more. By watching this video of my dissertation defense presentation you too can know far more about this amazing topic.

Title: “The Integration of Higher Cognition and Internal State Across Development”

The video is about an hour long and runs through four of my thesis experiments. You will hear my voice on the audio track and the video track displays the slides from my Keynote presentation. I had to use the internal microphone on my MacBook, so anytime I stray away from the lectern it gets a bit quiet. Still, it worked out rather well and I am happy to present it for your viewing.

Please to enjoy…

* View online at Google Video
* Downloadable Quicktime movie [~50MB]