Dartmouth Backward Masking Pulvinar VBM
Preliminary report on the association between pulvinar volume and the ability to detect backward-masked facial features
T1-weighted brain MRI of healthy young adults pooled from two Dartmouth backward masking fMRI studies (64 subjects), used to compare grey matter volume between people aware and unaware of masked faces. Raw images are not shared; per-subject VBM maps are public.
Overview
This entry covers the structural MRI cohort of a 2017 Neuropsychologia report by Kim, Mattek, Burr and Whalen. In earlier fMRI studies from the Whalen lab at Dartmouth College, about one in five participants noticed the fearful or happy faces hidden by backward masking and were dropped from the functional analyses. Here the authors pooled the anatomical scans of two such studies and compared grey matter volume between participants who noticed the hidden images and those who did not. The aware group had larger posterior thalamus volume, including both pulvinar nuclei. The T1-weighted scans are not released; per-subject voxel-based morphometry maps are public on NeuroVault.
Composition
64 young adults took part, 39 of them women, with a mean age of 19.6 years. 37 came from a study that masked full faces and 27 from a study that masked eye whites. Everyone was screened for psychiatric illness and none had taken psychotropic medication. A post-scan interview classed 12 participants as aware of the masked targets and 52 as unaware. State and trait anxiety scores were also collected.
Acquisition
All scans were acquired at the Dartmouth Brain Imaging Center on a 3T Philips Intera Achieva with an 8-channel head coil. The anatomical sequence was a sagittal MPRAGE with 160 slices at roughly 1 mm resolution. Both source studies also ran block-design task fMRI with 17 ms targets followed by masks, but the functional data are not part of this report or its deposit.
Annotations
The NeuroVault collection has one smoothed, Jacobian-modulated grey matter map per subject, produced with VBM8 and DARTEL in SPM8 and resampled to 1.5 mm MNI space, plus the group t map for aware against unaware. Each subject map carries age, sex, intracranial volume, source study and awareness group as metadata.
Known limitations
- Only derived grey matter maps are public; the T1-weighted images are not shared and have no published terms.
- The aware group is small (12 subjects), and the sample is narrow in age.
- The study code in the NeuroVault metadata is numeric and its mapping to the two source studies is not stated.
Cohort
Aggregate numbers from the sources below. Bars are relative to the 64 subjects.
Sex
- Female 39 61%
- Male 25 39%
2.1 Participants in Kim et al. 2017, Neuropsychologia, author manuscript PMC5930150
Modality
- MRI 64 100%
2.4 Voxel-based morphometry in Kim et al. 2017, Neuropsychologia, author manuscript PMC5930150
Condition
Groups can overlap
- Healthy control 64 100%
2.1 Participants in Kim et al. 2017, Neuropsychologia, author manuscript PMC5930150
Field strength
- 3 T 64 100%
2.3 Image acquisition in Kim et al. 2017, Neuropsychologia, author manuscript PMC5930150
Age
mean 19.6, median 19, range 18 to 25
Age in NeuroVault collection 3063 image metadata (CC0), Age field of the 64 subject maps, counted per subject; 2.1 Participants in Kim et al. 2017, Neuropsychologia, author manuscript PMC5930150
Contrast / sequence
Groups can overlap
- T1-weighted 64 100%
2.3 Image acquisition in Kim et al. 2017, Neuropsychologia, author manuscript PMC5930150
Scanner vendor
- Philips 64 100%
2.3 Image acquisition in Kim et al. 2017, Neuropsychologia, author manuscript PMC5930150
Country
- United States 64 100%
2.1 Participants in Kim et al. 2017, Neuropsychologia, author manuscript PMC5930150
License and access
Our reading of the license, not legal advice. Before you use the data, read the original license and confirm that your use is allowed. We take no responsibility for how you use a dataset. Full disclaimer
The data are not available outside the institution or study that holds them
The NeuroVault collection holds only derived data: smoothed, modulated grey matter maps in MNI space for each of the 64 subjects (VBM8, DARTEL) and the group t map, with age, sex, intracranial volume, study and awareness group as image metadata. These maps are under CC0 like all public NeuroVault data. The T1-weighted images themselves are not part of the deposit and no other route to them is given.
No published license or data use terms
The data holder has published no license and no data use terms. Any use, sharing or commercial right has to be agreed with the data holder, and nothing can be assumed to be allowed. Default copyright and data protection law still apply.
No license or data use terms are stated for the T1-weighted images. The CC0 dedication of NeuroVault covers only the derived grey matter maps and their metadata.
What you can do
- Commercial use Not stated
- Not stated
- Train ML models Not stated
- Create derived data Not stated
- Publish results Not stated
What you can share
- Share the data Not stated
- Share derived data Not stated
- Share trained models Not stated
What you must do
- Cite or credit Not stated
- Share alike Not stated
- Sign an agreement Not stated
- Ethics approval Not stated
- Manuscript review Not stated
- Release code Not stated
- Return results Not stated
- Delete after use Not stated
Limits
- No re-identification Not stated
- Location limits Not stated
Citation
Kim MJ, Mattek AM, Burr DA, Whalen PJ. Preliminary report on the association between pulvinar volume and the ability to detect backward-masked facial features. Neuropsychologia 128, 73-77 (2019). doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.10.034
Sources
Every number on this page comes from one of these documents. Each chart names the table or page it is taken from. The raw numbers are in stats.csv.