I'm friends with one of the labs that took part in this study, so to give a perspective of how this was received in the field. For the most part it wasn't a ra

I'm friends with one of the labs that took part in this study, so to give a perspective of how this was received in the field. For the most part it wasn't a radical finding, but really good to quantify and see the effects. It also demonstrated the importance of including and documenting the parameters of the analysis pipeline. Something else to keep in mind, especially when thinking about cognitive neuroscience (where scanning is an important tool), is that analysis are not done in isolation. Every experiment is motivated by behavioural results, neurobiological results or both. The goal of fMRI is to gain insight into the activity of the brain, but its also not very precise (given the scale of the brain). Basically this data is analyzed in the context of what has been shown before, and how it matches our current hypothesis. This doesn't mean such variation is acceptable (see first part of my comment), but it does mean that this doesn't cause all results on fMRI to be invalid.