LJDM seminars are held Wednesdays at 5pm in Room 313 at the UCL Psychology Department, 26 Bedford Way WC1H 0AP.

The schedule for the LJDM seminars this term is at ljdm.info and:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/pals/research/experimental-psychology/events 

08.02.2017, 5pm, 313

What the Success of Brain Imaging Implies about the Neural Code

Olivia Guest, UCL, UK

The success of fMRI places constraints on the nature of the neural code. The fact that researchers can infer similarities between neural representations, despite fMRI's limitations, implies that certain neural coding schemes are more likely than others. For fMRI to succeed given its low temporal and spatial resolution, the neural code must be smooth at the voxel and functional level such that similar stimuli engender similar internal representations. Through proof and simulation, we determine which coding schemes are plausible given both fMRI's successes and its limitations in measuring neural activity. Deep neural network approaches, which have been forwarded as computational accounts of the ventral stream, are consistent with the success of fMRI, though functional smoothness breaks down in the later network layers.  These results have implications for the nature of neural code and ventral stream, as well as what can be successfully investigated with fMRI.