Reliability in Cognitive Neuroscience ─ A Meta-Meta-Analysis

Cognitive neuroscientists increasingly claim that brain images generated by new brainimaging technologies reflect, correlate, or represent cognitive processes. In this book, WilliamUttal warns against these claims, arguing that, despite its utility in anatomic and physiologicalapplications, brain imaging research has not provided consistent evidence for correlation withcognition. Uttal bases his argument on an extensive review of the empirical literature, pointing tovariability in data not only among subjects within individual experiments but also in the newmeta-analytical approach that pools data from different experiments. This inconsistency of results,he argues, has profound implications for the field, suggesting that cognitive neuroscientists havenot yet proven their interpretations of the relation between brain activity captured by macroscopicimaging techniques and cognitive processes; what may have appeared to be correlations may have onlybeen illusions of association. He supports the view that the true correlates are located at a muchmore microscopic level of analysis: the networks of neurons that make up thebrain.

Uttal carries out comparisons of the empirical data at several levels ofdata pooling, including the meta-analytical. He argues that although the idea seems straightforward,the task of pooling data from different experiments is extremely complex, leading to uncertainresults, and that little is gained by it. Uttal's investigation suggests a need for cognitiveneuroscience to reevaluate the entire enterprise of brain imaging-cognition correlationalstudies.