Confronting racially exclusionary practices in the acquisition and analyses of neuroimaging data

Abstract

Across the brain sciences, institutions and individuals have begun to actively acknowledge and address the presence of racism, bias, and associated barriers to inclusivity within our community. However, even with these recent calls to action, limited attention has been directed to inequities in the research methods and analytic approaches we use. The very process of science, including how we recruit, the methodologies we utilize and the analyses we conduct, can have marked downstream effects on the equity and generalizability of scientific discoveries across the global population. Despite our best intentions, the use of field-standard approaches can inadvertently exclude participants from engaging in research and yield biased brain-behavior relationships. To address these pressing issues, we discuss actionable ways and important questions to move the fields of neuroscience and psychology forward in designing better studies to address the history of exclusionary practices in human brain mapping.

Figure 1.

In the United States, White and Non-Hispanic or Latino participants are overrepresented in human subject neuroscience research. Bar graphs reflect the inclusion of median percentage statistics by race and ethnicity respectively. Data is acquired from the National Institutes of Health Research and Disease Category (RCDC) Inclusion Statistics Reports from FY2018-FY2021.