title: The challenges of neural mind-reading paradigms.
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.
authors.affiliation: Departament de Psiquiatria i Medicina Legal, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and Fundació IMIM Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: Oscar
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Vilarroya
keywords: mind reading; multivariate pattern analysis; neural decoding; neural encoding; neural representation