During light-sleep, strong correlations were observed between fMRI and peripheral signals. This can be inferred from the fingertip pulse-oximeter signal as a proxy for sympathetic activity. Sympathetic activity may also affect fMRI during wake. In this work, we analyzed data collected during cognitive tasks and deep breathing, showed strong spatio-temporal relations between pupil behavior, skin vascular tone, and fMRI signal. We demonstrate that sympathetic activity can be elicited by a variety of stimuli, that those additional measures might be useful for physiological regression and to better distinguish neuronal and autonomic contributions, which are mostly observed as anti-correlation patterns in fMRI.
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