AUTHOR=Vilarroya Oscar TITLE=The challenges of neural mind-reading paradigms JOURNAL=Frontiers in Human Neuroscience VOLUME=7 YEAR=2013 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00306 DOI=10.3389/fnhum.2013.00306 ISSN=1662-5161 ABSTRACT=

Neural mind-reading studies, based on multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) methods, are providing exciting new studies. Some of the results obtained with these paradigms have raised high expectations, such as the possibility of creating brain reading devices. However, such hopes are based on the assumptions that: (a) the BOLD signal is a marker of neural activity; (b) the BOLD pattern identified by a MVPA is a neurally sound pattern; (c) the MVPA's feature space is a good mapping of the neural representation of a stimulus, and (d) the pattern identified by a MVPA corresponds to a representation. I examine here the challenges that still have to be met before fully accepting such assumptions.