Chapter 14: To err is human: investigating neural function by correlating error patterns with human behavior
Dirk Walther, Diane M. Beck and Li Fei-Fei
Department of Psychology,
Princeton University
Vision science has made tremendous progress in understanding how the brain
processes various components of our visual world. Much of this progress is
owed to the advent of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a non-invasive
neuroimaging method that allows for the imaging of activity in the whole brain.
Indeed, fMRI has enabled the mapping of several important visual areas in
the human brain, for instance, retinotopic visual cortex including primary
visual cortex and extrastriate regions (Engel, Rumelhart et al. 1994), the
lateral occipital cortex for object perception (Malach, Reppas et al. 1995),
the fusiform face area (Kanwisher, McDermott et al. 1997), and the parahippocampal
place area (Epstein and Kanwisher 1998). In these seminal studies univariate
statistics (each voxel was treated independently) was employed to produce
maps of functional activity. It has now been shown that considering the specific
pattern of activity of multiple voxels in response to visually presented objects
allows for finer distinctions between categories of objects, leveraging the
distributed nature of the representation of objects in the human brain (Haxby,
Gobbini et al. 2001). This discovery has spurred a surge of studies applying
multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) techniques to many questions in visual
neuroscience and beyond.