A defense of using resting state fMRI as null data for estimating false positive rates

A recent Editorial by Slotnick (2017) reconsiders the findings of our paper on the accuracy of false positive rate control with cluster inference in fMRI (Eklund et al, 2016), in particular criticising our use of resting state fMRI data as a source for null data in the evaluation of task fMRI methods. We defend this use of resting fMRI data, as while there is much structure in this data, we argue it is representative of task data noise and as such analysis software should be able to accommodate this noise. We also discuss a potential problem with Slotnick's own method.