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Comment
. 2016 May 3;113(18):E2476-9.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1603186113. Epub 2016 Apr 19.

Reply to Wager et al.: Pain and the dACC: The importance of hit rate-adjusted effects and posterior probabilities with fair priors

Matthew D Lieberman  1 , Shannon M Burns  2 , Jared B Torre  2 , Naomi I Eisenberger  2
Affiliations
Comment

Reply to Wager et al.: Pain and the dACC: The importance of hit rate-adjusted effects and posterior probabilities with fair priors

Matthew D Lieberman et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .
No abstract available

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
(A) We recreated Wager et al.’s analysis (8) of 240 studies with activations within 8 mm of MNI coordinates 0, 10, 34 in the Neurosynth database. Two of us manually coded study titles and then considered these in light of Neurosynth-based term loadings for each study and, when necessary, consulted the original article. (B) The total number of studies in the Neurosynth database per term. (C) Term hit rates computed by dividing the number of studies observed at MNI coordinates 0, 10, 34 for a term by the total number of studies for that term in the Neurosynth database. (D) The number of studies that would be observed within 8 mm of MNI coordinates 0, 10, 34 assuming a fair distribution of studies (400 studies/term). Multiplying each term’s hit rate by 400 studies yields 100 expected effects (e.g., 400 pain studies × 10.0% hit rate = 40 expected pain studies; 400 motor studies × 1.2% hit rate = 5 expected motor studies). Note that this correction could not be applied to the heterogeneous “other” category and thus was kept at the 15% level from A. Altogether, there were a total of 118 total expected effects, of which 34% would be pain effects (i.e., 40/118), nearly 5 times more than the percentage for any cognitive terms, and more than all cognitive terms combined. Pain and emotion are the only terms that exceed the 8% expected by chance.
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.
(A) We used Neurosynth’s Python-based core tools to run a series of customized analyses with equal numbers of studies per term. We had Neurosynth directly compare, via random sampling, the maximum number of studies in each pairing that was possible while producing equal numbers per term (see B for counts). Thus, we created a fair empirical prior of 0.50 for each term. Posterior probabilities above 0.50 suggest some selectivity for one term over another. Posterior probabilities were computed for each of 1,110 voxels in our dACC mask (created from the Harvard−Oxford probabilistic atlas by selecting voxels at least 35% likely to be in dACC). Across all of the voxels in the dACC mask, the average posterior probability for pain relative to each term is shown above each bar (average = 0.68). This does not imply that 68% of all future dACC activations will be pain effects, but it does indicate a decidedly stronger structure-to-function mapping (i.e., relative selectivity) between dACC and pain than between dACC and these other terms. Shown at the bottom of each bar is the number and percentage of dACC voxels with a higher posterior probability for that term than its alternative. The posterior probability for pain is higher than for all three alternative terms (i.e., pain > executive AND pain > conflict AND pain > salience) in 86% of voxels (956/1,110). Results are similar when pain is compared against fear and autonomic. (B) Voxels with a greater posterior probability for pain are shown in red. Voxels with a greater posterior probability for the other terms are shown in blue. These analyses are based on the standard terms implemented by Neurosynth. Despite Wager et al. using these automated terms in multiple publications of their own and showing they correspond well with manually based categorization (10), they suggest that Neurosynth’s automated term generation may not correspond to the actual processes studied in different papers (8). To assess this, we examined a sample of papers in Neurosynth for the terms pain, executive, conflict, and salience (50 studies per term) and found ≥96% were termed appropriately.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Comment on

  • The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex is selective for pain: Results from large-scale reverse inference.
    Lieberman MD, Eisenberger NI. Lieberman MD, et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2015 Dec 8;112(49):15250-5. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1515083112. Epub 2015 Nov 18. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2015. PMID: 26582792 Free PMC article.
  • Pain in the ACC?
    Wager TD, Atlas LY, Botvinick MM, Chang LJ, Coghill RC, Davis KD, Iannetti GD, Poldrack RA, Shackman AJ, Yarkoni T. Wager TD, et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2016 May 3;113(18):E2474-5. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1600282113. Epub 2016 Apr 19. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2016. PMID: 27095849 Free PMC article. No abstract available.

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