Real-time Adaptive Design Optimization Within Functional MRI Experiments

Efficient data collection is an important goal in cognitive neuroimaging studies because of the high cost of data acquisition. One method of improving efficiency is to maximize the informativeness of the data collected on each trial. We propose an Adaptive Design Optimization (Cavagnaro et al. Neural Computation 22, 887–905 2010 ; Myung et al. Journal of Mathematical Psychology 57, 53–67 2013 ) procedure to optimize the sequencing of stimuli for model-based functional neuroimaging studies. Our method uses the Joint Modeling Framework (Turner et al. NeuroImage 72, 193–206 2013 , 2019 ) to maximize the information learned about how the brain produces a behavior by integrating over neural and behavioral data simultaneously. We validate our method in simulation and real-world experiments by showing how Adaptive Design Optimization proposes the optimal stimulus sequence to reduce uncertainty and improve accuracy from a Bayesian perspective.