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Brain reading and behavioral methods provide complementary perspectives on the representation of concepts

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posted on 2020-06-11, 21:12 authored by Andrew Bauer, Marcel JustMarcel Just
The advent of brain reading techniques has enabled new approaches to the study of concept representation, based on the analysis of multivoxel activation patterns evoked by the contemplation of individual concepts such as animal concepts. The present fMRI study characterized the representation of 30 animal concepts. Dimensionality reduction of the multivoxel activation patterns underlying the individual animal concepts indicated that the semantic building blocks of the brain's representations of the animals corresponded to intrinsic animal properties (e.g. fierceness, intelligence, size). These findings were compared to behavioral studies of concept representation, which have typically collected pairwise similarity ratings between two concepts (e.g. Henley, 1969). Behavioral similarity judgments, by contrast, indicated that the animals were organized into taxonomically defined groups (e.g. canine, feline, equine). The difference in the results between the brain reading and behavioral approaches might derive from differences in cognitive processing during judging similarities versus contemplating one animal at a time. Brain reading approaches may have an advantage in describing thoughts about an individual concept, owing to the ability to decode brain activation patterns elicited by the brief consideration of a single concept (e.g. word reading) without a complex cognitive or behavioral task (e.g. similarity judgments). On the other hand, some behavioral tasks may tend to evoke a concept from numerous perspectives, yielding a representation of the breadth and sophistication of the concept knowledge. These results suggest that neural and behavioral measures offer complementary perspectives that together characterize the content and structure of concept representations.

Funding

NIMH MH029617

Office of Naval Research N00014-16-1-2694

History

Publisher Statement

Bauer, A. J., & Just, M. A. (2019). Brain reading and behavioral methods provide complementary perspectives on the representation of concepts. NeuroImage, 186, 794-805. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.11.022 © 2018 Published by Elsevier Inc.

Date

2018-10-31

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