In the brain, information travels among distributed networks, groups of interconnected regions that work together and contribute to specific behaviors, feelings or thoughts. To study how information travels through these networks under different conditions, many neuroscientists rely on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a noninvasive imaging technique that measures blood-oxygen changes indirectly linked to neural activity.

While this method can help derive statistical relationships between activity in different brain areas, conventional approaches for analyzing fMRI scans do not establish which regions influence others.

Researchers at the Institute for Basic Science in South Korea, Sungkyunkwan University and other institutions recently developed a new neuroimaging analysis framework that could also be used to estimate how activity in one area of the brain influences activity in another.