A nice 2010 Human Brain Mapping paper by Church, Petersen & Schlaggar covers a number of interpretational issues confronting modern neuroimaging. Their particular application is pediatric neuroimaging (I will also use developmental examples), but the general issues apply to nearly all fMRI studies. So here are some important things to keep in mind whenever you read an fMRI study:
1. "The Performance Burden" If neural activity is found to differ between groups or conditions, you can't necessarily make inferences about differences in neural information processing - this could reflect…