Dear Conn-experts,

in advance excuse me if my questions are a little bit blunt. I just started to work with CONN. I came across some unresolvable questions even after reading lots of helpful posts in this forum I'm still a little bit lost.

We conducted an fMRI experiment with one task in a blocked design (between blocks there was fixation cross). I modelled the task as "condition". Secondly I set up a "rest" condition ( Onset 0 and duration Inf) to control for the slots between the task blocks.

I am interested in the connectivity between 2 separated seeds and multiple ROIs (two seeds and 4 more ROIs, in total 6 ROIs, conducting a ROI-to-ROI analysis) which we set up before the analysis. I uploaded the files in the set up steps. Further I want to examine the influence of a metric covariate (varying across the subjects) on the connectivity between the ROIs (uploaded as second level covariate as well).

Firstly, dear experts, is it right/good practice to use the CONN Toolbox to examine the influence of a covariate on the connectivity between ROIs during a task in a blocked design ? I read about the generalized form of PPI and now I wonder if my approach is  correct.

Secondly, I modelled the second level contrasts as following: subject-specific Contrast [0 1] for AllSubjects and the Covariate to get the main effect of the covariate; condition-specific contrast [1] for condition. I wondered if it would be the same information/tested assumption if I choose [0 1] for rest and condition as a contrast? For seeds I choose separately the two defined seed ROIs.
Is this set up right or am I mistaken to set up my analysis in this fashion.

Thirdly, I wanted to control the results of this analysis for the influence of other covariates, e.g. age, gender and an interaction between the already included metric covariate with a binary covariate (like gender) using SPSS. I exported the values alright, but it seems that I can only extract the beta's for the AllSubjects Contrast [1]. I am looking for a way to extract the betas for the subject-specific contrast [0 1] for Allsubjects and the metric covariate. Could anyone point me in the right direction?

I thank you all in advance and hope deeply for some advices.

Yours Sincerely,
Claudia