The Affective Neuroimaging Collaboratory (ANiC) is a collaborative research initiative dedicated to multi-subject analyses of fMRI and PET studies of affect and motivation.
ANiC is hosted by the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab (CAN Lab) at Dartmouth College and led by three principal investigators: Tor Wager of Dartmouth College, Phil Kragel of Emory University, and Lukas Van Oudenhove of KU Leuven. However, we hope to collaborate and coauthor with other researchers across the globe.
By working together across laboratories, we aim to build a large, multi-study dataset of single person-level neuroimaging data related to basic affective and motivational processes. We envision a series of collaborative publications, with eventual open-access sharing of data that contributing scientists agree to share.
Our goals for the project are threefold:
Goal (1): Curate a quality-controlled data resource with (a) dataset systematically sampled across affective domains and subdomains with >1,000 participants, and (b) an inclusive dataset of >2,000 participants.
Goal (2): Analyze data and publish collaborative articles to understand the organization of affect and emotion in the brain.
Goal (3): Make data resources available to the consortium and/or public, with levels of sharing determined by each researcher who contributes data.
We are building off of a systematically sampled collection of 270 person-level images curated in Kragel et al. (2018), Nature Neuroscience.
We focus on single person-level statistic images (“beta” or “cope” maps) because they are:
- De-identified (thus not considered “human subjects research” from an IRB perspective)
- “Lightweight” and feasible to share across laboratories without extensive storage space (i.e., thousands of participants in < 1 TB) and processing time
- Useful for developing and validating brain models and signatures that make predictions about individual people
- Useful for training and testing models that generalize across scanners, research groups, and populations
This project is an ongoing one, and we are looking for the help of interested scientists for its advancement. If you are interested in getting involved and/or believe you might have datasets to contribute, take a look at our data-sharing policy, and reach out to anic.science@gmail.com.