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Correlating Behavioral Responses to fMRI Signals from Human Prefrontal Cortex: Examining Cognitive Processes Using Task Analysis

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Only some spatial patterns of fMRI response are read out in task performance.

Mark A Williams¹, Sabin Dang, Nancy G Kanwisher

¹McGovern Institute for Brain Research, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA. markaw@mit.edu

Nature Neuroscience

|May 9, 2007

Summary

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) reveals category information in brain activity patterns. However, only patterns in the lateral occipital cortex (LOC) are stronger for correct task performance, indicating selective readout.

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Cognitive Neuroscience
Neuroimaging

Background:

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) reveals that spatial patterns of brain activity contain information about visual categories.
It remains unclear whether these neural patterns are actively used ('read out') to guide behavior.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate if category information present in cortical spatial patterns is utilized during task performance.
To determine which brain regions exhibit a 'readout' of category information linked to behavioral accuracy.

Main Methods:

Utilized classification techniques on fMRI data to decode category information from cortical activity patterns.
Compared spatial patterns between correct and incorrect behavioral trials in both retinotopic cortex and the lateral occipital complex (LOC).

Main Results:

Spatial patterns in both retinotopic cortex and LOC contained category information.
The strength of these category-specific patterns was significantly higher for correct trials compared to incorrect trials, but only within the LOC.
This suggests that not all category information encoded in the brain is behaviorally relevant.

Conclusions:

The brain selectively 'reads out' some, but not all, spatially encoded category information for task performance.
The lateral occipital cortex (LOC) plays a crucial role in utilizing category information for accurate visual processing.