Twitter on MVPA

I often bang on about how useful twitter is for crowd-sourcing a research community. Today I was reminded of quite brilliant the people on twitter can be at helping to overcome an 'I don't know where to start'-type information problem.

I'm currently helping to design an fMRI study which could benefit considerably from the application of multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA). Having no practical experience with MVPA means I'm trying to figure out what I need to do to make the MVPA bit of the study a success. After a few hours of searching, I have come across and read a number of broad theoretical methods papers, but nothing that gives me the confidence that anything I come up with will be viable. Of course, there's no right way of designing a study, but there are a tonne of wrong ways, and I definitely want to avoid those.

So, I turned to twitter:

Twitter help please. Can anyone recommend a beginner's guide to fMRI MVPA, from trial counts required to software, analysis steps etc? — Akira O'Connor (@akiraoc) January 23, 2013

Relays and Retweets from @hugospiers, @zarinahagnew and @neuroconscience led to the following tweets coming my way (stripped of @s for ease of reading... kind of).

Try this little controbution from me for a conceptual overview of the methods 1.usa.gov/OpNy88. — Martin Chadwick (@MartinJChadwick) January 23, 2013

...and Pereira et al. is useful for the nitty-gritty details 1.usa.gov/zZKGJT. — Martin Chadwick (@MartinJChadwick) January 23, 2013

Chapter 9 in our book fmri-data-analysis.org has an overview though I don't think we specify minimum trial counts — Russ Poldrack (@russpoldrack) January 23, 2013

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22820344 this from @martinjchadwick and @heidsworld may be of particular interest — Tom Hartley (@tom_hartley) January 23, 2013

princeton.edu/~fpereira/Pape… princeton.edu/~fpereira/Pape… princeton.edu/~fpereira/Pape… minerva.csbmb.princeton.edu/searchmight/ — Crazy Scientist (@Wandedob) January 23, 2013

There's a set of posts on Rainer Goebel's blog from 2009 which is a really good introduction:brainvoyager.com/bvresources/Ra… — Matt Wall (@m_wall) January 23, 2013

Or this Trends paper from 2006 is good too:cs.princeton.edu/courses/archiv… — Matt Wall (@m_wall) January 23, 2013

Our lab works with min 40 trials per condition for MVPA. I think there is a poster out there maybe from the Haxby group on this. — M Barnett-Cowan (@multisensebrain) January 23, 2013

Sounds about right - depends a LOT on task/design though. Could perhaps get away with less. — Matt Wall (@m_wall) January 23, 2013

Sure, I could have come up with as many articles to read by typing "MVPA" into Google Scholar (as I have done in the past), but the best thing about my twitter-sourced reading list is that I'm confident it's pitched at the right level.

I'm humbled by how generous people are with their time, and glad so many friendly academics are on twitter. I hope collegiality and friendliness like this encourages many more to join our ranks.