Examining the temporal evolution of top-down task dependent modulations across cortical depths.

We demonstrate the feasibility of simultaneously acquiring submillimeter and subsecond functional images to examine the temporal evolution of task-dependent modulations across cortical depths elicited by socially relevant stimuli such as faces at the single subject level. We achieved this using NORDIC denoising. Our results highlight the complexity of laminar fMRI results in humans which can be better resolved by high spatiotemporal recordings. We suggest that, when studied with sufficient, sub-second temporal resolution, depth-dependent fMRI has the potential to address laminar communication within and across areas, which is crucial to understanding the complexity of human hierarchal organization at the mesoscale level.