The early origins and the growing popularity of the individual-subject analytic approach in human neuroscience

In the last three decades, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has transformed the field of cognitive neuroscience. A standard analytic approach entails aligning a set of individual activation maps in a common brain space, performing a statistical test in each voxel, and interpreting significant activation clusters with respect to macroanatomic landmarks. In the last several years, however, this group analytic approach is being increasingly replaced by analyses where neural responses are examined within each brain individually. In this opinion piece, I trace the origins of individual-subject analyses in human neuroscience and speculate on why group analyses had risen vastly in popularity during the 2000s. I then discuss a core problem with group analyses - their limited utility in informing the human cognitive architecture - and talk about how the individual-subject functional localization approach solves this problem. Finally, I discuss other reasons for why researchers have been turning to individual-subject analyses, and argue that such approaches are likely to be the future of human neuroscience.

Automated summary

fMRI has greatly impacted cognitive neuroscience, with individual analyses replacing group analyses. While group analyses have limitations in understanding human cognitive architecture, individual analyses are seen as more effective and likely the future direction of research in human neuroscience.