Date of Graduation

12-2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in Psychology (MA)

Degree Level

Graduate

Department

Psychological Science

Advisor/Mentor

Leong, Josiah

Committee Member

Shields, Grant

Second Committee Member

Judah, Matt

Keywords

Neuroimaging; Neuroscience; Reward

Abstract

Recent research has questioned the reliability of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI). The findings suggest poor test-retest reliability of FMRI measures across brain areas and tasks, and specifically in subcortical brain areas during reward-related tasks. Further, data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study showed low reliability and low stability of the fitted coefficients from whole-brain regression analyses of the Monetary Incentive Delay (MID) task. However, optimizing methods might improve reliability, for example: (1) acquiring single-band rather than multi-band FMRI sequences, (2) extracting raw activity rather than fitted coefficients, and (3) honing analyses to target brain areas during specific trial phases. To test this possibility, we collected data from 19 healthy adults (mean age = 28, 9 female). Each participant completed 80 trials of the MID task during an FMRI scan, repeated at 2 sessions 3 days apart. We conducted standard pre-processing on the data and extracted raw percent signal change from the Nucleus Accumbens (NAcc). Critically, we achieved high reliability in the NAcc during gain anticipation (ICC(3,1) = 0.89, p < 0.01). Reliability of NAcc activity was highest during the anticipation trial phase of the large gain condition (+$5). Our preliminary findings show that optimizing FMRI acquisition and analysis can lead to reliable measurement of subcortical brain areas during reward tasks.

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