Kriegeskorte Nikolaus, Goebel Rainer, Bandettini Peter
Section on Functional Imaging Methods, Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, National Institute of Mental Health, Building 10, Room 1D80B, 10 Center Drive MSC 1148, Bethesda, MD 20892-1148, USA.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2006 Mar 7;103(10):3863-8. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0600244103. Epub 2006 Feb 28.
The development of high-resolution neuroimaging and multielectrode electrophysiological recording provides neuroscientists with huge amounts of multivariate data. The complexity of the data creates a need for statistical summary, but the local averaging standardly applied to this end may obscure the effects of greatest neuroscientific interest. In neuroimaging, for example, brain mapping analysis has focused on the discovery of activation, i.e., of extended brain regions whose average activity changes across experimental conditions. Here we propose to ask a more general question of the data: Where in the brain does the activity pattern contain information about the experimental condition? To address this question, we propose scanning the imaged volume with a "searchlight," whose contents are analyzed multivariately at each location in the brain.
高分辨率神经成像和多电极电生理记录技术的发展为神经科学家提供了大量多变量数据。数据的复杂性使得需要进行统计汇总，但为此通常采用的局部平均法可能会掩盖神经科学最感兴趣的效应。例如，在神经成像中，脑图谱分析一直专注于发现激活，即平均活动在不同实验条件下发生变化的扩展脑区。在此，我们建议对数据提出一个更普遍的问题：大脑中的哪些部位其活动模式包含有关实验条件的信息？为解决这个问题，我们建议用一个“探照灯”扫描成像体积，在大脑的每个位置对其内容进行多变量分析。
