Signa hd x twinspeed scanner

All participants were scanned on a 3-Tesla General Electric Signa HD x Twinspeed scanner (Milwaukee, Wisc.), fitted with a quadrature birdcage head coil. For the fMRI, we acquired 260 (Go/No-Go task) and 480 (sustained attention task) T2*-weighted volumes on 37 (Go/No-Go task) and 31 (sustained attention task) non-adjacent planes parallel to the anterior-posterior commissure (TE = 30 ms, TR = 1.8 s (Go/No-Go task); 1.5 s (sustained attention task), flip angle = 73° (Go/No-Go task); 68° (sustained attention task), slice thickness = 3.0 mm, in-plane voxel-size = 3.75 mm², slice gap = 0.7 mm (Go/No-Go task); 1.4 mm (sustained attention task); matrix size = 64 × 64 voxels). Also, a high resolution gradient echo structural scan, on which activation maps were superimposed, was sagitally acquired to be used during normalisation of the fMRI data into Talairach space. (TR = 3 s, TE = 30 ms, 43 slices, flip angle = 90°, slice gap = 0.3 mm, slice thickness = 3.0 mm, matrix size = 128 × 128 voxels).

Gradient-echo echo planar magnetic resonance imaging data were acquired on a 3T General Electric Signa HDx Twinspeed scanner (Milwaukee, WI) using a quadrature birdcage head coil. In each of 22 noncontiguous planes parallel to the anterior–posterior commissure, 480 T2*-weighted images depicting blood oxygenation level–dependent (BOLD) contrast spanning the whole brain were acquired (echo time = 30 ms; repetition time = 1.5 seconds; flip angle = 60^o; in-plane resolution = 3.75 mm; slice thickness = 5.0 mm; slice skip = 0.5 mm). A whole-brain high-resolution structural scan (inversion recovery gradient echo planar imaging) on which to superimpose the activation maps was also acquired in the intercommissural plane (echo time = 40 ms; repetition time = 3 seconds; flip angle = 90^o; slices = 43; slice thickness = 3.0 mm; slice skip = 0.3 mm) providing complete brain coverage.