High-Resolution fMRI Acquisition Protocol

Standard field MRI images were acquired using a 3T Verio MRI scanner (Siemens, Erlangen, Germany) with a 32-channel head coil. A multiband T2*-weighted pulse sequence with an acceleration factor of 6 was used (Moeller et al., 2010 (link); Uğurbil et al., 2013 (link)). This provided the opportunity to acquire data with increased spatial (2 mm isotropic) and temporal (TR: 1300 ms) resolution than available with standard EPI sequences. The following acquisition parameters were used: TE: 40 ms; flip angle: 66°, 72 transversal slices. A high-saturation first volume of each acquired multiband run was collected for registration purposes. Field-maps were acquired for field unwarping.