10 April, Adina ROSKIES [WEBINAR]

10 April 2020
14-16 Greenwhich Mean Time 
(check your local time here)

Adina ROSKIES

(Dartmouth College)

Representational Similarity Analysis in neuroimaging
​– Proxy vehicles and provisionalrepresentations

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​Abstract

Functional neuroimaging is sometimes criticized as having nothing of interest to offer those interested in psychology: it is only concerned with where in the brain things happen, not how they happen. Although this criticism has never been a valid one, novel analytical methods increasingly make clear that imaging can give us access to constructs of interest to psychology. In this paper I argue that neuroimaging can give us an important, if limited, window into the large-scale structure of neural representation. I describe representational Similarity Analysis, increasingly used in neuroimaging studies, and lay out desiderata for representations in general. In that context I discuss what RSA can and cannot tell us about neural representation. I compare it to a different experiment which has been embraced as indicative of representation by psychology, and argue that it compares favorably.