[Potential BUG] Task events is modality-specific?

[oesteban]

Describe your problem in detail.

Currently, task events are presented as modality-specific.

Describe what you expected.

That task events are cross-modality.

BIDS specification section

https://bids-specification.readthedocs.io/en/stable/modality-specific-files/task-events.html

[Remi-Gau]

To make sure I understand, you are saying that eventhough an events.tsv file will in most cases be found in a datatype subfolder, the rules that apply to them are the same irrespective of the datatype and that therefore it feels strange to have those in the "modality specific" section if the spec?

[oesteban]

Correct -- the thought process is what kind of modality task events are?

[Remi-Gau]

The fact that task was specific to some datatypes seems less and less true now. So it may be worth moving that up one level.

[VisLab]

I agree with @oesteban. Also I think that task event is a misnomer in that event files contain markers for things that happen during the experiment. Sometimes these are not related to the task but markers on the experimental time line for other things.

[oesteban]

@VisLab - you may be interested in #1750. In fact, BIDS has already _stim.tsv.gz files to do that (albeit, with limitations such as explicitly disallowing non-regular samplings and hence, forcing those markers to be aligned with some sampling reference).

Regarding the asynchronous events that are not task-related, we hit that issue pretty hard in BEP 020 #1128 and are about to propose a _physioevents file.

_stim could be made asynchronous by means of similar mechanisms or allowed to be asynchronous.

Anyways - we are trying to improve these aspects of the spec step-by-step and #1750 is on top of the list.