You're right. I definitely don't mean to sound like I was an enlightened graduate student. Nothing ever passed FWE using Bonferroni, so we almost always resorted to using uncorrected p-values with cluster thresholding, with the cluster and voxel thresholds set from using alphasim (which gets the probability of having a cluster of that size significant from a random dataset, given the smoothness of your actual images).
If I recall correctly, all the major neuroimaging packages (AFNI, SPM, FSL) had options for cluster-size thresholding at the time. Along with tools like alpha sim to estimate cluster-level FDR (but I think that ultimately had issues with it's algorithm, discovered only a few years later...).
I just remember thinking that if the salmon paper had a reasonable cluster-threshold, none of the spurious voxels would have been considered in the final analysis.
Sorry, I was writing to HN more than responding to you particularly. It is sometimes easy for non-scientists to underestimate scientists and think of them as fools, when in fact the problems are frequently hard.
I believe that you are correct that about the time of the salmon poster there were other methods available for multiple comparison correction. The work in the early- to mid-2000's was much more "wild-west" however.
Indeed cluster correction may have its own issues, re your link. I think that a good approach these days is to eschew whole-brain approaches for theory-drive, a prior i ROIs, then supplement those analyses with a whole brain exploratory analysis.
If I recall correctly, all the major neuroimaging packages (AFNI, SPM, FSL) had options for cluster-size thresholding at the time. Along with tools like alpha sim to estimate cluster-level FDR (but I think that ultimately had issues with it's algorithm, discovered only a few years later...).
I just remember thinking that if the salmon paper had a reasonable cluster-threshold, none of the spurious voxels would have been considered in the final analysis.
Granted, several years later, a paper came out suggesting that method would inflate false positives (http://www.pnas.org/content/113/28/7900.full).
I imagine the neuroimaging field, particularly the stats part, has changed rapidly since I left.