Zina B. Ward (University of Pittsburgh)
Individual differences complicate the neuroscientific task of aggregating and comparing data across human brains. Many researchers have adopted a "cartographic approach" in response to this challenge, in which they register data from multiple subjects to a common brain template. Here I argue that there is no ideal, universally applicable registration procedure to map brains to templates. The method that is best depends on the phenomenon of interest. This position, which I call registration pluralism, has important methodological implications, three of which I discuss here: it complicates or undercuts efforts to develop multi-modal atlases, functional registration methods, and standardized preprocessing pipelines.
