Dear colleagues
I hope some of you are interested in what cognitive science can
contribute to the understanding of design thinking. The following
abstract suggests that some progress is being made that may, sooner or
later, transform what we know about designing. "This is the first time
that anybody has been able to track the specific object of a person's
thoughts." according to Marcel Just the Director of the Brain Imaging
and Research Center at Carnegie Mellon University where the work is
taking place. Just and Mitchell have just been given a $1.1 million
grant to carry this work forward. You can freely access the paper on
the "Public Library of Science" on line journal PLoS one.
Chuck,
Dr. Charles Burnette
234 South Third Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106
+215 629 1387
[log in to unmask]
Using fMRI Brain Activation to Identify Cognitive States
Associated with Perception of Tools and Dwellings
Svetlana V. Shinkareva1,2*, Robert A. Mason1, Vicente L. Malave1, Wei
Wang2, Tom M. Mitchell2, Marcel Adam Just1
1 Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, United States of America, 2 Machine Learning Department,
School
of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, United States of America
Previous studies have succeeded in identifying the cognitive state
corresponding to the perception of a set of depicted
categories, such as tools, by analyzing the accompanying pattern of
brain activity, measured with fMRI. The current research
focused on identifying the cognitive state associated with a 4s
viewing of an individual line drawing (1 of 10 familiar objects, 5
tools and 5 dwellings, such as a hammer or a castle). Here we
demonstrate the ability to reliably (1) identify which of the 10
drawings a participant was viewing, based on that participant’s
characteristic whole-brain neural activation patterns, excluding
visual areas; (2) identify the category of the object with even higher
accuracy, based on that participant’s activation; and (3)
identify, for the first time, both individual objects and the category
of the object the participant was viewing, based only on
other participants’ activation patterns. The voxels important for
category identification were located similarly across
participants, and distributed throughout the cortex, focused in
ventral temporal perceptual areas but also including more
frontal association areas (and somewhat left-lateralized). These
findings indicate the presence of stable, distributed,
communal, and identifiable neural states corresponding to object
concepts.
Citation: Shinkareva SV, Mason RA, Malave VL, Wang W, Mitchell TM, et
al (2008) Using fMRI Brain Activation to Identify Cognitive States
Associated
with Perception of Tools and Dwellings. PLoS ONE 3(1): e1394. doi:
10.1371/journal.pone.0001394
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