Spurious correlations in simultaneous EEG-fMRI driven by in-scanner movement

•Motion causes spurious effects using common artifact correction in EEG-fMRI analysis.•Spurious motion effects resemble neurophysiological plausible effects.•Minor task-related motion can cause spurious task-related EEG effects.•Motion-BOLD and EEG-BOLD correlations are largely overlapping after convolution with the HRF.

Simultaneous EEG-fMRI provides an increasingly attractive research tool to investigate cognitive processes with high temporal and spatial resolution. However, artifacts in EEG data introduced by the MR scanner still remain a major obstacle. This study, employing commonly used artifact correction steps, shows that head motion, one overlooked major source of artifacts in EEG-fMRI data, can cause plausible EEG effects and EEG-BOLD correlations. Specifically, low-frequency EEG (< 20 Hz) is strongly correlated with in-scanner movement. Accordingly, minor head motion (< 0.2 mm) induces spurious effects in a twofold manner: Small differences in task-correlated motion elicit spurious low-frequency effects, and, as motion concurrently influences fMRI data, EEG-BOLD correlations closely match motion-fMRI correlations. We demonstrate these effects in a memory encoding experiment showing that obtained theta power (~ 3-7 Hz) effects and channel-level theta-BOLD correlations reflect motion in the scanner. These findings highlight an important caveat that needs to be addressed by future EEG-fMRI studies.