A defense of using resting-state fMRI as null data for estimating false positive rates

A recent Editorial in Cognitive Neuroscience reconsiders the findings of our work on the accuracy of false positive rate control with cluster inference in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), in particular criticizing our use of resting-state fMRI as a source for null data in the evaluation of task fMRI methods. We defend this use of resting fMRI data, as while there is much structure in this data, we argue it is representative of task data noise and task analysis software should be able to accommodate this noise. We also discuss a potential problem with Slotnick’s own method.