Achievement

A trainee, S. Katie Ihnen, has led a study closely examining purported brain activation differences between men and women processing language. A first experiment she performed found some differences in brain activation, but a second closely-related experiment found differences that poorly correlated with the first experiment. She then combined the male and female datasets and randomly assigned people to two groups. These randomly assigned groups also generated a "significant" difference between their neural activation. Her work challenged current thinking and practice in behavioral fMRI and established a standard for repeatability across task conditions to verify purported differences in functional brain activity. This work is in press in Neuroimage.