Alaina Lurie
Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
UROP Fellowship: Center for Human Growth and Development
Research Mentor(s): Arianna Gard, PhD, Luke Hyde, PhD
Department of Psychology
Presentation Date: Thursday, July 30, 2020 | Session 1 | Presenter: 3
Authors: Alaina Lurie, Arianna Gard, Luke Hyde
Abstract
Technological advances since the turn of the century have given researchers more methods than ever before to understand and investigate the inner workings of our brains. The integration of human neuroimaging into the social sciences is critical to advancing our understanding of human behavior (Falk, et al., 2013). “Population neuroscience” emphasizes the need for combining representative sampling with investigations of underlying neural mechanisms. Since the way we conduct sampling for neuroimaging studies is so critical to the generalizability of the findings, to facilitate this goal and as a part of my summer UROP training in the MiND Lab, I worked on a team to conduct a structured review of neuroimaging studies in 2019. The objective of this review is to identify to what extent published articles in this field report participant demographics, reasons for data loss (e.g., [movement]), recruitment procedures, and specification of the target sample (i.e., what broader population the study tries to generalize to). The review pulled articles from several top journals in “Psychiatry”, “Neuroscience”, and “Neuroimaging”, as well as some specialty journals, to yield approximately 3600 articles for inclusion. Using DistillerSR, the most widely used systematic review software, three reviewers were randomly assigned articles to be screened for exclusion criteria. Articles were excluded based on the following criteria: if the study used non-human animal subjects; if the article was a systematic review, meta-analysis, commentary, methods or technical report, or single-subject case study; and if the study did not include a neuroimaging technique. After exclusion, about 1500 articles were included in the structured review and will advance to the data extraction step. Data extraction involves full-text screening and extraction of a variety of data points, including demographics (e.g., gender, race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status) of the sample. In addition, the review also examines how the sample was collected; this includes questions involving recruitment procedures, controls vs. cases, and how and why people are removed from the neuroimaging analysis. Once data extraction is completed (this step is currently in progress), data will be combined across all published articles included in the review to comment on the current methodological practices in human neuroimaging studies.The aim of this review is to identify areas of improvement with regards to recruiting participants for neuroimaging studies, reporting participant demographics, and the ability to generalize specific results to broader populations.
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Research Disciplines
Social Sciences
