The Effect of fMRI (Noise) on Cognitive Control

Bernhard Hommel et.al of Universiteit Leiden in the Netherlands wanted to see what effect playing some recorded MRI scanner sounds had on people's ability to perform some simple cognitive tasks since fMRI is noisy.

They found that participants were more effective in controlling episodic retrieval of previous stimulus-response bindings (Experiment 1), in switching to a new task (Experiment 2), and shielding a current goal from distracting response tendencies (Experiment 3) if they were exposed to challenging task situations, such as 70 dB echo planar imaging noise sampled from an fMRI scanner.

Moreover, they stated that generalizing from fMRI findings to behavioral observations and vice versa seems to be more problematic than commonly thought, at least as far as control  processes are concerned. In a sense, then, investigating cognitive processes by means of  fMRI... is inevitably facing Heisenberg’s (1927) uncertainty principle, according to which the act of measurement can change what is being measured.

Now, psychologists should ask a physicist if they want details explanations.

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Hommel, B., Fischer, R., Colzato, L., van den Wildenberg, W. and Cellini, C. (2011). The effect of fMRI (noise) on cognitive control. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance DOI: 10.1037/a0026353