Abstract
The potential negative impact of head movement during fMRI has long been appreciated. Although a variety of prospective and retrospective approaches have been developed to help mitigate these effects, reducing head movement in the first place remains the most appealing strategy for optimizing data quality. Real-time interventions, in which participants are provided feedback regarding their scan-to-scan motion, have recently shown promise in reducing motion during resting state fMRI. However, whether feedback might similarly reduce motion during task-based fMRI is an open question. In particular, it is unclear whether participants can effectively monitor motion feedback while attending to task-related demands. Here we assessed whether a combination of real-time and between-run feedback could reduce head motion during task-based fMRI. During an auditory word repetition task, 78 adult participants (aged 18–81) were pseudorandomly assigned to receive feedback, implemented in FIRMM software, or not. We quantified movement using framewise displacement (FD). We found that motion feedback resulted in a statistically significant reduction in participant head motion, with a small-to-moderate effect size (reducing average FD from 0.347 to 0.282). There was some evidence for a change of effect over the course of six runs, but no clear evidence for practice effects based on motion feedback. We conclude that under some circumstances real-time feedback may reduce head motion during task-based fMRI, although its effectiveness may depend on the specific participant population and task demands of a given study.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
Data availability statement: The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in OpenNeuro at https://doi.org/10.18112/openneuro.ds004285.v1.0.0, reference number ds004285.
IRB statement: The study reported here was conducted according to a protocol approved by the Washington University in Saint Louis Institutional Review Board.
Minor update to correct an error in the text of the results section.