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Neural representations

Exploring brain representations through the lens of similarity structures

Nature Reviews Psychology volume 3, page 506 (2024)Cite this article

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I have always been interested in understanding how the brain represents concepts and categories in individuals with diverse sensory experiences. To that end, I use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to capture the neural responses evoked by a plethora of stimuli — including images, sounds and words — in sighted and blind people. In doing this research, my main challenge was to determine how to manipulate and compare the brain representations of these multiple categories and concepts across different sensory modalities and experiences. The groundbreaking work by Kriegeskorte et al. provided an elegant solution to my problem.

In their seminal work, Kriegeskorte and colleagues (2008) capitalized on multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA). Unlike fMRI univariate approaches, MVPA analyses do not focus on how each individual voxel independently responds to a particular stimulus. Instead, they consider sets of voxels and determine whether specific activation patterns emerge for specific stimuli. Kriegeskorte et al. recognized that multivariate response patterns to different experimental conditions could be examined on the basis of their reciprocal similarities. Rather than directly examining activity patterns, they compared the activity patterns associated with each pair of experimental conditions to generate a representational dissimilarity matrix. Each pair of experimental conditions is represented by a single element in the matrix, and each element represents the dissimilarity of activity patterns between the corresponding conditions through a numerical value. These matrices serve as signatures of regional representations in the brain, abstracting away from the spatial layout and focusing solely on the represented information itself.

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  • Haxby, J. V. et al. Distributed and overlapping representations of faces and objects in ventral temporal cortex. Science 293, 2425–2430 (2001)

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  • Mattioni, S., Rezk, M., Battal, C., Vadlamudi, J. & Collignon, O. Impact of blindness onset on the representation of sound categories in occipital and temporal cortices. eLife 11, e79370 (2022)

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  1. Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Gent, Gent, Belgium

    Stefania Mattioni

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  1. Stefania Mattioni
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Correspondence to Stefania Mattioni.

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Mattioni, S. Exploring brain representations through the lens of similarity structures. Nat Rev Psychol 3, 506 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-024-00335-8

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