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Searching through functional space reveals distributed visual, auditory, and semantic coding in the human brain

The extent to which brain functions are localized or distributed is a foundational question in neuroscience. In the human brain, common fMRI methods such as cluster correction, atlas parcellation, and anatomical searchlight are biased by design toward finding localized representations. Here we intro...

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Autores principales: Kumar, Sreejan, Ellis, Cameron T., O’Connell, Thomas P., Chun, Marvin M., Turk-Browne, Nicholas B.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7738169/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33270655
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008457
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author Kumar, Sreejan
Ellis, Cameron T.
O’Connell, Thomas P.
Chun, Marvin M.
Turk-Browne, Nicholas B.
author_facet Kumar, Sreejan
Ellis, Cameron T.
O’Connell, Thomas P.
Chun, Marvin M.
Turk-Browne, Nicholas B.
author_sort Kumar, Sreejan
collection PubMed
description The extent to which brain functions are localized or distributed is a foundational question in neuroscience. In the human brain, common fMRI methods such as cluster correction, atlas parcellation, and anatomical searchlight are biased by design toward finding localized representations. Here we introduce the functional searchlight approach as an alternative to anatomical searchlight analysis, the most commonly used exploratory multivariate fMRI technique. Functional searchlight removes any anatomical bias by grouping voxels based only on functional similarity and ignoring anatomical proximity. We report evidence that visual and auditory features from deep neural networks and semantic features from a natural language processing model, as well as object representations, are more widely distributed across the brain than previously acknowledged and that functional searchlight can improve model-based similarity and decoding accuracy. This approach provides a new way to evaluate and constrain computational models with brain activity and pushes our understanding of human brain function further along the spectrum from strict modularity toward distributed representation.
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spelling pubmed-77381692020-12-28 Searching through functional space reveals distributed visual, auditory, and semantic coding in the human brain Kumar, Sreejan Ellis, Cameron T. O’Connell, Thomas P. Chun, Marvin M. Turk-Browne, Nicholas B. PLoS Comput Biol Research Article The extent to which brain functions are localized or distributed is a foundational question in neuroscience. In the human brain, common fMRI methods such as cluster correction, atlas parcellation, and anatomical searchlight are biased by design toward finding localized representations. Here we introduce the functional searchlight approach as an alternative to anatomical searchlight analysis, the most commonly used exploratory multivariate fMRI technique. Functional searchlight removes any anatomical bias by grouping voxels based only on functional similarity and ignoring anatomical proximity. We report evidence that visual and auditory features from deep neural networks and semantic features from a natural language processing model, as well as object representations, are more widely distributed across the brain than previously acknowledged and that functional searchlight can improve model-based similarity and decoding accuracy. This approach provides a new way to evaluate and constrain computational models with brain activity and pushes our understanding of human brain function further along the spectrum from strict modularity toward distributed representation. Public Library of Science 2020-12-03 /pmc/articles/PMC7738169/ /pubmed/33270655 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008457 Text en © 2020 Kumar et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Kumar, Sreejan
Ellis, Cameron T.
O’Connell, Thomas P.
Chun, Marvin M.
Turk-Browne, Nicholas B.
Searching through functional space reveals distributed visual, auditory, and semantic coding in the human brain
title Searching through functional space reveals distributed visual, auditory, and semantic coding in the human brain
title_full Searching through functional space reveals distributed visual, auditory, and semantic coding in the human brain
title_fullStr Searching through functional space reveals distributed visual, auditory, and semantic coding in the human brain
title_full_unstemmed Searching through functional space reveals distributed visual, auditory, and semantic coding in the human brain
title_short Searching through functional space reveals distributed visual, auditory, and semantic coding in the human brain
title_sort searching through functional space reveals distributed visual, auditory, and semantic coding in the human brain
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7738169/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33270655
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008457
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