A Meta-Meta-Analysis of Brain Functions

Thousands of brain imaging studies are published each year. A subset of these studies are replications, or slight variations, of previous studies. Attempting to come to a solid conclusion based on the complex brain activity patterns reported by all these replications can be daunting. Meta-analysis is one tool that has been used to make sense of it all.

Meta-analyses take locations of brain activity in published scientific papers and pool them together to see if there is any consistency.

This is typically done using a standardized brain that all the studies fit their data to (e.g., Talairach). Activation coordinates are then placed on a template brain as dots. When dots tend to clump together then the author can claim some consistency is present across studies. See the first figure for an example of this kind of result.

More sophisticated ways of doing this have emerged, however. One of these advanced methods is called activation likelihood estimation (ALE). This method was developed by Peter Terkeltaub et al. (in conjunction with Jason Chein and Julie Fiez) in 2002 and extended by Laird et al. in 2005.

ALE computes the probability of each part of the brain being active across studies. This is much more powerful than simple point-plotting because it takes much of the guess-work out of deciding if a result is consistent across studies or not.

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