Hi all,
I’m designing an fMRI study with the main goal of performing MVPA on the data. The phenomenon I want to measure is a perceptual event that must unfold over a long interval (approximately 40–45 seconds). Because of this constraint, the most appropriate approach appears to be a block design with one long continuous event per block, repeated through my 4 conditions in several runs.
Since I can’t include multiple trials within each block, I will obtain only a single beta estimate per block. With four conditions, the design may require a large number of runs to obtain enough estimates for MVPA.
I have experience with MVPA for event-related designs but much less with long-duration block designs of this type. Would have any recommendations on how to design and optimize such a paradigm for effective MVPA? I thought about artificially splitting the blocks into several events, but this seems like a poor solution because it would reduce the independence of the events.
Thank you in advance for any advice you can share !