The State of Motion: Demographic and representational consequences of motion-based exclusion in fMRI

Abstract

Large-scale neuroimaging datasets are increasingly used to map relationships between brain structure, function, and behavior across the human lifespan. Routinely, analyses exclude participants who moved too much during imaging. While this decision is framed as quality control, it is increasingly recognized that head motion is not randomly distributed across individuals within a study, and so motion-based exclusion may preferentially remove people with particular characteristics relevant to the scientific goals of the study. Here we survey head motion and how it relates to participant characteristics across six large, publicly available datasets spanning nearly the entire human lifespan, namely the Human Connectome Project (HCP) Young Adult, HCP in Development, HCP in Aging, Adolescent Brain Cognitive DevelopmentSM Study, UK Biobank, and Spatial Topology project. These six datasets comprise more than 50,000 unique participants and 300,000 scans. We further benchmark our findings against motion distributions aggregated by MRIQC across more than 1.5 million scans. Under commonly applied strict exclusion thresholds, large fractions of participants would be removed (exceeding 80 % in the UK Biobank task data), and these removals were demographically structured, disproportionately excluding younger and older participants, those with higher BMI, and those with motion-associated clinical conditions. Respiratory pseudo-motion inflated estimates of head motion in adult cohorts, and applying notch filtering to remove respiratory frequencies from these estimates meaningfully reduced exclusion rates. Exclusion also carried downstream consequences. Strict thresholds reduced statistical power, inflated study costs, and altered the apparent predictability of behavioral phenotypes by removing a non-random, behaviorally distinct subgroup. These findings demonstrate that motion exclusion thresholds are not neutral quality-control decisions but structured selection mechanisms that reshape the composition of neuroimaging samples. We recommend that studies report the demographic characteristics of excluded participants, prefer data-driven censoring methods over fixed motion cutoffs, and clarify the target population while considering appropriate weighting techniques.