Data retention in awake infant fMRI: Lessons from more than 750 scanning sessions

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in awake infants has the potential to reveal how the early developing brain gives rise to cognition and behavior. However, awake infant fMRI poses significant methodological challenges that have hampered wider adoption. The present work takes stock after the collection of a substantial amount of awake infant fMRI data across multiple studies from two labs at different institutions. We leveraged these data to glean insights on participant recruitment, experimental design, and data acquisition that could be useful to consider for future studies. Across 766 awake infant fMRI sessions, we explored the factors that influenced how much usable data were obtained per session (average of 9 minutes). The age of an infant predicted whether they would successfully enter the scanner (younger was more likely) and, if they did enter, the number of minutes of functional data retained after preprocessing. The amount of functional data retained was also influenced by assigned sex (female more), experimental paradigm (movies better than blocks and events), and stimulus content (social better than abstract). In addition, we assessed the value of attempting to collect multiple experiments per session, an approach that yielded more than one usable experiment averaging across all sessions (including those with no data). Although any given scan is unpredictable, these findings support the feasibility of awake infant fMRI and suggest practices to optimize future research.