AUTHOR=Akama Hiroyuki , Murphy Brian , Na Li , Shimizu Yumiko , Poesio Massimo TITLE=Decoding semantics across fMRI sessions with different stimulus modalities: a practical MVPA study JOURNAL=Frontiers in Neuroinformatics VOLUME=6 YEAR=2012 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroinformatics/articles/10.3389/fninf.2012.00024 DOI=10.3389/fninf.2012.00024 ISSN=1662-5196 ABSTRACT=

Both embodied and symbolic accounts of conceptual organization would predict partial sharing and partial differentiation between the neural activations seen for concepts activated via different stimulus modalities. But cross-participant and cross-session variability in BOLD activity patterns makes analyses of such patterns with MVPA methods challenging. Here, we examine the effect of cross-modal and individual variation on the machine learning analysis of fMRI data recorded during a word property generation task. We present the same set of living and non-living concepts (land-mammals, or work tools) to a cohort of Japanese participants in two sessions: the first using auditory presentation of spoken words; the second using visual presentation of words written in Japanese characters. Classification accuracies confirmed that these semantic categories could be detected in single trials, with within-session predictive accuracies of 80–90%. However cross-session prediction (learning from auditory-task data to classify data from the written-word-task, or vice versa) suffered from a performance penalty, achieving 65–75% (still individually significant at p « 0.05). We carried out several follow-on analyses to investigate the reason for this shortfall, concluding that distributional differences in neither time nor space alone could account for it. Rather, combined spatio-temporal patterns of activity need to be identified for successful cross-session learning, and this suggests that feature selection strategies could be modified to take advantage of this.