Recent advances in fMRI have enabled non-invasive measurements of brain function in awake, behaving humans at unprecedented spatial resolutions, allowing us to separate activity in distinct cortical layers. While most layer fMRI studies to date have focused on primary cortices, we argue that the next big steps forward in our understanding of cognition will come from expanding this technology into higher-order association cortices, to characterize depth-dependent activity during increasingly sophisticated mental processes. We outline phenomena and theories ripe for investigation with layer fMRI, including perception and imagery, selective attention, and predictive coding. We discuss practical and theoretical challenges to cognitive applications of layer fMRI, including localizing regions of interest in the face of substantial anatomical heterogeneity across individuals, designing appropriate task paradigms within the confines of acquisition parameters, and generating hypotheses for higher-order brain regions where the laminar circuitry is less well understood. We consider how applying layer fMRI in association cortex may help inform computational models of brain function as well as shed light on consciousness and mental illness, and issue a call to arms to our fellow methodologists and neuroscientists to bring layer fMRI to this next frontier.

功能磁共振成像的最新进展使我们能够对清醒时的大脑功能进行非侵入性测量，以前所未有的空间分辨率表现人类，使我们能够在不同的皮质层中分离活动。虽然迄今为止大多数层 fMRI 研究都集中在初级皮层，但我们认为，我们对认知的理解的下一个重大步骤将来自将该技术扩展到更高阶的关联皮层，以表征日益复杂的心理过程中的深度依赖性活动. 我们概述了可以使用层 fMRI 进行研究的现象和理论，包括感知和图像、选择性注意和预测编码。我们讨论了层 fMRI 认知应用的实际和理论挑战，包括在个体之间存在大量解剖异质性时定位感兴趣的区域，在获取参数的范围内设计适当的任务范式，以及为层状电路不太了解的高阶大脑区域生成假设。我们考虑如何在关联皮层中应用层 fMRI 可能有助于为大脑功能的计算模型提供信息，并阐明意识和精神疾病，并向我们的方法学家和神经科学家同事发出呼吁，将层 fMRI 带到下一个前沿。