Coordinates, Consensus, Cooperation: Towards a Cumulative Science of Human Brain Function

The first symposium at Cognitive Neuroscience Society 2010 Annual Meeting two weeks ago was an important and ambitious one, a call for the neuroimaging community to advance beyond the current piecemeal single-study approach to produce comprehensive, structured, and searchable databases. The session was chaired by University of Colorado Boulder post-doc Dr. Tal Yarkoni, author of the excellent blog, [citation needed].

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Symposium Session 1
Sunday, April 18, 10:00 am - 12:00 pm, Westmount et al Ballroom

Towards a cumulative science of human brain function

Chair: Tal Yarkoni, Columbia University, University of Colorado at Boulder

This symposium is designed to promote development of a cumulative science of human brain function that advances knowledge through formal synthesis of the rapidly growing functional neuroimaging literature. The first speaker (Tal Yarkoni) will motivate the need for a cumulative approach by highlighting several limitations of individual studies that can only be overcome by synthesizing the results of multiple studies. The second speaker (David Van Essen) will discuss the basic tools required in order to support formal synthesis of multiple studies, focusing particular attention on SumsDB, a massive database of functional neuroimaging data that can support sophisticated search and visualization queries. The third and fourth speakers will discuss two different approaches to combining and filtering results from multiple studies. Tor Wager will review state-of-the-art approaches to meta-analysis of fMRI data, providing empirical examples of the power of meta-analysis to both validate and disconfirm widely held views of brain organization. Russell Poldrack will discuss a novel taxonomic approach that uses collaboratively annotated meta-data to develop formal ontologies of brain function. Collectively, these four complementary talks will familiarize the audience with (a) the importance of adopting cumulative approaches to functional neuroimaging data; (b) currently available tools for accessing and retrieving information from multiple studies; and (c) state-of-the-art techniques for synthesizing the results of different functional neuroimaging studies into an integrated whole.
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Tal has compiled this helpful list of links and slides from the CNS symposium.

In future posts, I'll try to summarize the major points of each speaker.