Which Findings from the Functional Neuromaging Literature Can We Trust?

Abstract

In their recent "Cluster Failure" paper, Eklund and colleagues cast doubt on the accuracy of a widely used statistical test in functional neuroimaging. Here, we leverage nonparametric methods that control the false discovery rate to offer more nuanced, quantitative guidance about which findings in the existing literature can be trusted. We show that, in the task studies examined by Eklund et al., most clusters originally reported to be significant are indeed trustworthy by the false discovery rate benchmark.