bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
Enhancing task fMRI individual difference research with neural signatures
January 2025 • David A. A. Baranger, Aaron J. Gorelik, Sarah E. Paul, Alexander S. Hatoum, Nico U.F. Dosenbach, Ryan Bogdan
Abstract Task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (tb-fMRI) has advanced our understanding of brain-behavior relationships. Standard tb-fMRI analyses suffer from limited reliability and low effect sizes, and machine learning (ML) approaches often require thousands of subjects, restricting their ability to inform how brain function may arise from and contribute to individual differences. Using data from 9,024 early adolescents, we derived a classifier (‘neural signature’) distinguishing between high and low…