Rebecca Wilson, a PhD student in the School of Psychology, has recently published her work in the journal NeuroImage. The study investigates dynamic changes in the connectivity of brain regions using fMRI.
Current methods generally characterise the connectivity over periods of minutes, but this study shows that it can be investigated on a timescale of seconds. This is particularly useful as the brain is constantly changing its connectivity with every change in behavior. The paper demonstrates that the method outlined can be used to investigate how the brain changes when we sleep, enabling researchers to look at the mechanisms of sleep in more detail.
Reference
Title: Influence of epoch length on measurement of dynamic functional connectivity in wakefulness and behavioural validation in sleep
Journal: NeuroImage