What Is the Test-Retest Reliability of Common Task-Functional MRI Measures? New Empirical Evidence and a Meta-Analysis.
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2020-07
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Identifying brain biomarkers of disease risk is a growing priority in neuroscience. The ability to identify meaningful biomarkers is limited by measurement reliability; unreliable measures are unsuitable for predicting clinical outcomes. Measuring brain activity using task functional MRI (fMRI) is a major focus of biomarker development; however, the reliability of task fMRI has not been systematically evaluated. We present converging evidence demonstrating poor reliability of task-fMRI measures. First, a meta-analysis of 90 experiments (N = 1,008) revealed poor overall reliability-mean intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) = .397. Second, the test-retest reliabilities of activity in a priori regions of interest across 11 common fMRI tasks collected by the Human Connectome Project (N = 45) and the Dunedin Study (N = 20) were poor (ICCs = .067-.485). Collectively, these findings demonstrate that common task-fMRI measures are not currently suitable for brain biomarker discovery or for individual-differences research. We review how this state of affairs came to be and highlight avenues for improving task-fMRI reliability.
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Elliott, Maxwell L, Annchen R Knodt, David Ireland, Meriwether L Morris, Richie Poulton, Sandhya Ramrakha, Maria L Sison, Terrie E Moffitt, et al. (2020). What Is the Test-Retest Reliability of Common Task-Functional MRI Measures? New Empirical Evidence and a Meta-Analysis. Psychological science, 31(7). pp. 792–806. 10.1177/0956797620916786 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/21207.
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Scholars@Duke

Terrie E. Moffitt
Terrie E. Moffitt, Ph.D., is the Nannerl O. Keohane University Professor of Psychology at Duke University, and Professor of Social Development at King’s College London. Her expertise is in the areas of longitudinal methods, developmental theory, mental disorders and antisocial behaviors, neuropsychology, and genomics in behavioral science. She is currently uncovering the consequences of a lifetime of mental and behavioral disorder on processes of aging. She is the Associate Director of the Dunedin Longitudinal Study, which follows a 1972 birth cohort in New Zealand. She also co-founded the Environmental Risk Longitudinal Twin Study (E-Risk), which follows a 1994 birth cohort in the UK. Dr. Moffitt also is a licensed clinical psychologist, with specialization in neuropsychological assessment. She collaborates with criminologists, economists, geneticists, epidemiologists, sociologists, demographers, gerontologists, statisticians, neuroscientists, medical scientists, opthalmologists, and dentists. Dr. Moffitt is a fellow of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , as well as the British Academy, Academy of Medical Sciences (UK), Academia Europa, Association of Psychological Science, and the American Society of Criminology. She holds honorary doctorates from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, and Universitat Basel, Switzerland. For her research, Dr. Moffitt has received both the American Psychological Association's Early Career Contribution Award and Distinguished Career Award. Dr. Moffitt was also awarded a Royal Society-Wolfson Merit Award, the Klaus-Grawe Prize, and was a recipient of the Stockholm Prize in Criminology, NARSAD Ruane Prize, the Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize, and in 2022 the Grawemeyer Prize. Her service includes serving as chair of the Board on Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sensory Science at NASEM, Chair of the NIA Data Monitoring Committee for the Health and Retirement Study, and Chair of the Jury for the Klaus J. Jacobs Prize in Switzerland. Dr. Moffitt attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for her undergraduate degree in psychology. She continued her training in psychology at the University of Southern California, receiving an M.A. in experimental animal behavior, and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. She also completed postdoctoral training in geriatrics and neuropsychology at the University of California Los Angeles Neuropsychiatric Institute. In her spare time, she works on her poison-ivy farm in North Carolina.

Avshalom Caspi
Caspi’s research is concerned with three questions: (1) How do childhood experiences shape aging and the course of health inequalities across the life span? (2) How do genetic differences between people shape the way they respond to their environments? (3) How do mental health problems unfold across and shape the life course?

Ahmad Hariri
Integrating psychology, neuroimaging, pharmacology and molecular genetics in the search for biological pathways mediating individual differences in behavior and related risk for psychopathology.
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