Table 1.

Taxonomy of noise in neuroscience

Category of putative ‘noise’ source	Examples of‘noise’	Consensus regarding classification as ‘noise’	Management and mitigation strategies
Measurement and hardware limitations	-thermal noise in extracellular recordings -MRI scanner artifacts (spikes, ghosting, signal dropout)	Yes	-estimate based on known relationships [113] -quality control procedures (distortion correction, field mapping [114])
Human physiological signals and behavior	-cardiac pulsatility -respiratory cycles -head motion	Yes	-image-based correction methods [115] -denoising using independent component analysis [79] -global signal regression [64]
Spontaneous (non-evoked) neural activity	-random spiking of individual neurons -low-frequency fluctuations in BOLD signal	No	-consider temporal context [89] -characterize as functional connectivity [116]
Variability	-synaptic noise due to variable transmission -BOLD signal variability -trial-to-trial differences in behavioral responses	No	-relate to neural circuit plasticity [18] -characterize using MSSD, SD, MSE measures [117] -dense sampling of individual subjects [118]