Exploring commonalities across participants in the neural representation of objects

Svetlana V Shinkareva,Marcel Adam Just,Vicente L Malave,Tom M Mitchell

doi:10.1002/hbm.21296

Abstract

The question of whether the neural encodings of objects are similar across different people is one of the key questions in cognitive neuroscience. This article examines the commonalities in the internal representation of objects, as measured with fMRI, across individuals in two complementary ways. First, we examine the commonalities in the internal representation of objects across people at the level of interobject distances, derived from whole brain fMRI data, and second, at the level of spatially localized anatomical brain regions that contain sufficient information for identification of object categories, without making the assumption that their voxel patterns are spatially matched in a common space. We examine the commonalities in internal representation of objects on 3T fMRI data collected while participants viewed line drawings depicting various tools and dwellings. This exploratory study revealed the extent to which the representation of individual concepts, and their mutual similarity, is shared across participants.

Highlights

The way that concrete objects are represented in the human brain is an important question in cognitive neuroscience
We examined how similar the internal representation of objects is across participants, in terms of the consistency of interobject distances derived from whole-brain fMRI data
There was a commonality in the internal representation of objects across participants, and part of the variability in the data was explained by the category structure of the objects

Summary

Introduction

The way that concrete objects are represented in the human brain is an important question in cognitive neuroscience. Multivoxel pattern analysis has been applied to fMRI-measured brain activity to associate the brain activity patterns with presented stimuli (see [Haynes and Rees, 2006; Norman et al, 2006; O’Toole et al, 2007; Pereira et al, 2009] for reviews of this approach). This approach has the potential to be useful in determining how semantic information about objects is represented in the cerebral cortex. The similarity of object representation across individuals is of particular interest

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