Recent evidence suggests a probabilistic relationship exists between the phonological/orthographic form of a word and its lexical-syntactic category (specifically nouns vs. verbs) such that syntactic prediction may elicit form-based estimates in sensory cortex. We tested this hypothesis by conducting multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) of fMRI data from early visual cortex (EVC), left ventral t...

Brain decoding with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) requires analysis of complex, multivariate data. Multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) has been widely used in recent years. MVPA treats the activation of multiple voxels from fMRI data as a pattern and decodes brain states using pattern classification methods. Feature selection is a critical procedure of MVPA because it decides whic...

Current theories of cognitive aging argue that neural representations become less distinctive in old age, a phenomenon known as dedifferentiation. The present study used multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) to measure age differences in the distinctiveness of distributed patterns of neural activation evoked by different categories of visual images. We found that neural activation patterns within...

Multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) has been applied successfully to a variety of fMRI research questions in healthy participants. The full potential of applying MVPA to functional data from patient groups has yet to be fully explored. Our goal in this study was to investigate whether MVPA might yield a sensitive predictor of patient symptoms. We also sought to demonstrate that this benefit can...

Working memory function declines across the lifespan. Computational models of aging attribute such memory impairments to reduced distinctiveness between neural representations of different mental states in old age, a phenomenon termed dedifferentiation. These models predict that neural distinctiveness should be reduced uniformly across experimental conditions in older adults. In contrast, the C...

PREDICTING COGNITIVE DECLINE IN OLDER ADULTS THROUGH MULTI-VOXEL PATTERN ANALYSIS Nathan Hantke, M.S. Marquette University, 2014 Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that is associated with cognitive and structural decline beyond what is seen in normal, healthy aging. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research indicates that prior to the onset of measu...

For functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) has been shown to be a sensitive method to detect areas that encode certain stimulus dimensions. By moving a searchlight through the volume of the brain, one can continuously map the information content about the experimental conditions of interest to the brain. Traditionally, the searchlight is defined as a v...

The goal of the study was to identify the neural representation of a noun's meaning in one language based on the neural representation of that same noun in another language. Machine learning methods were used to train classifiers to identify which individual noun bilingual participants were thinking about in one language based solely on their brain activation in the other language. The study sh...

We present a high-dimensional model of the representational space in human ventral temporal (VT) cortex in which dimensions are response-tuning functions that are common across individuals and patterns of response are modeled as weighted sums of basis patterns associated with these response tunings. We map response-pattern vectors, measured with fMRI, from individual subjects' voxel spaces into...

Humans can readily decode emotion expressions from faces and perceive them in a categorical manner. The model by Haxby and colleagues proposes a number of different brain regions with each taking over specific roles in face processing. One key question is how these regions directly compare to one another in successfully discriminating between various emotional facial expressions. To address thi...