Decoding Cognitive Processes from Functional MRI

The goal of cognitive neuroscience is to understand the the brain processes that underlie cognitive function. These brain processes are studied by examining neural responses to experimental tasks and stimuli. While most experiments are designed to isolate a single cognitive process, the resulting brain images often encode multiple processes simultaneously. Thus standard classification methods are inappropriate for decoding cognitive processes. We propose a multilabel classification approach for decoding, and present empirical evidence that multilabel classification can accurately predict the set of cognitive processes associated with an experimental contrast image.