Abstract
Cognitive neuroscience has been very successful at employing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) for probing cognition, right from the start of fMRI with the discovery of the blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) effect in the early 1990s (Ogawa et al., Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 87(24):9868–9872, 1990; Kwong et al., Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 89(12):5675–5679, 1992). Numerous studies have mapped the functional architecture of the cerebral cortex at the macroscopic scale. This chapter will focus on the importance of MRI for building more detailed models of the entire human brain at the mesoscopic level. This specifically means the visualization, both structurally and functionally, of the small nuclei involved in decision-making such as the subthalamic nucleus and locus coeruleus, data that might be used to indicate directionality of information flow in the brain, such as seen in laminar imaging and the investigation of feedback loops as can be found in the cerebellum. These investigations are only achievable with the modern ultrahigh field (UHF) scanners; hence this chapter will focus on the use of 7 T MRI in cognitive neuroscience. After a brief general introduction on the concepts of the BOLD response and the MRI systems used to visualize those responses, the characteristics of UHF MRI will be discussed in Sect. 1, followed by Sect. 2. The benefits of quantitative imaging are discussed in Sect. 3, and finally, we will discuss connecting the structural information with the functional data in Sect. 4.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | An Introduction to Model-Based Cognitive Neuroscience |
Pages | 153-184 |
Publication status | Published - 2024 |