The objective of the study is to evaluate neural circuitry supporting a cognitive control task, and associated practice-related changes via acquisition of blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) signal collected using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). FMR images are acquired from participants engaged in antisaccade (generating a glance away from a cue) performance at two scanning sessions: 1) pre-practice before any exposure to the task, and 2) post-practice, after one week of daily practice on antisaccades, prosaccades (glancing towards a target) or fixation (maintaining gaze on a target). The three practice groups are compared across the two sessions, and analyses are conducted via the application of a model-free clustering technique based on wavelet analysis. This series of procedures is developed to address analysis problems inherent in fMRI data and is composed of several steps: data aggregation, no trend test, decorrelation, principal component analysis and K-means clustering. Also, we develop a semiparametric approach under shape invariance to quantify and test the differences in sessions and groups using the property that brain signals from a task-related experiment may exhibit a similar pattern in regions of interest across participants. We estimate the common function with local polynomial regression and estimate the shape invariance model parameters using evolutionary optimization methods. Using the proposed approach, we compare BOLD signals in multiple regions of interest for the three practice groups at the two sessions and quantify the effects of task practice in these groups.
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