2012/01/01 by Hiroyuki Akama, Brian Murphy, Li Na +2 · 1 citation
Psychology · Neuroscience · #Action Observation and Synchronization #Child and Animal Learning Development #Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism
paper · pdf · doi:10.3389/fninf.2012.00024
openalex publication_date 2012/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
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.