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Reading positional codes with fMRI: Problems and solutions.

Published version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Abstract

Neural mechanisms which bind items into sequences have been investigated in a large body of research in animal neurophysiology and human neuroimaging. However, a major problem in interpreting this data arises from a fact that several unrelated processes, such as memory load, sensory adaptation, and reward expectation, also change in a consistent manner as the sequence unfolds. In this paper we use computational simulations and data from two fMRI experiments to show that a host of unrelated neural processes can masquerade as sequence representations. We show that dissociating such unrelated processes from a dedicated sequence representation is an especially difficult problem for fMRI data, which is almost exclusively the modality used in human experiments. We suggest that such fMRI results must be treated with caution and in many cases the assumed neural representation might actually reflect unrelated processes.

Description

Keywords

Algorithms, Brain, Brain Mapping, Cognition, Computer Simulation, Humans, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Memory, Mental Recall, Models, Psychological, Reward

Journal Title

PLoS One

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

1932-6203
1932-6203

Volume Title

12

Publisher

PLOS
Sponsorship
Medical Research Council (MC_UU_00005/11)
This study was funded via the UK Medical Research Council intramural grant MCA060-5PR30.