infonet-economy

Functional neuroimaging techniques are used widely in cognitive neuroscience to investigate aspects of functional specialization and functional integration in the human brain. Functional integration can be characterized in two ways – functional connectivity and effective connectivity. Whereas functional connectivity describes statistical dependencies between data, effective connectivity rests on a mechanistic model of the causal effects that generated the data. This article reviews the conceptual and methodological bases of established techniques for characterizing functional and effective connectivity using electrophysiological and functional neuroimaging data.