Coding of Visual, Auditory, Rule, and Response Information in the Brain: 10 Years of Multivoxel Pattern Analysis

Abstract

Abstract■ How is the processing of task information organized in the brain? Many views of brain function emphasize modularity, with different regions specialized for processing different types of information. However, recent accounts also highlight flexibility, pointing especially to the highly consistent pattern of frontoparietal activation across many tasks. Although early insights from functional imaging were based on overall activation levels during different cognitive operations, in the last decade many researchers have used multivoxel pattern analyses to interrogate the representational content of activations, mapping out the brain regions that make particular stimulus, rule, or response distinctions. Here, we drew on 100 searchlight decoding analyses from 57 published papers to characterize the information coded in different brain networks. The outcome was highly structured. Visual, auditory, and motor networks predominantly (but not exclusively) coded visual, auditory, and motor information, respectively. By contrast, the frontoparietal multiple-demand network was characterized by domain generality, coding visual, auditory, motor, and rule information. The contribution of the default mode network and voxels elsewhere was minor. The data suggest a balanced picture of brain organization in which sensory and motor networks are relatively specialized for information in their own domain, whereas a specific frontoparietal network acts as a domain-general "core" with the capacity to code many different aspects of a task. ■

Initial neural representation of individual rules after first-time instruction

“…Importantly, if any of these scenarios could be confirmed empirically, this provided first-time evidence for human PFC representing entirely novel task rules in the initial phase of task practice. This contrasts with existing MVPA studies, which have shown that prefrontal cortex regions flexibly code currently task-relevant information, but this was confined to already well-familiarized task features 4,30,31 . A few pioneering studies have shown that such prefrontal representations are retrieved and re-cycled in the service of newly instructed tasks that rely on, or are recomposed of familiar task elements [32][33][34] .…”

Distinct distributed patterns of neural activity are associated with two languages in the bilingual brain

“…( 38 ) for a recent review]. To examine whether the voxels within these ROIs responded more strongly to words than false fonts, we performed a univariate analysis on (Chinese real words + English real words) versus (Chinese false fonts + English false fonts).…”

Hypnosis and top-down regulation of consciousness

“…One study observed broad activations of lateral prefrontal and parietal cortices among highly suggestible individuals during response to a colour hallucination suggestion (McGeown et al, 2012). These regions comprise the frontal-parietal, executive attention, or multiple-demand network, a set of regions reliably activated across a range of operations (Woolgar, Jackson, & Duncan, 2016) and thereby imply that the suggestion was implemented through normal cognitive control mechanisms.…”