心理学研究のツールとしての脳イメージングの最前線

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Non-invasive neuroimaging methods, especially functional magnetic resonance imaging（fMRI） , has become an essential tool for psychological research. Conventional fMRI studies employed so-called ‘cognitive subtraction analysis’, which compares the overall brain activities under the experimental condition and those in the control condition to extract the neural substrates related to a particular cognitive process. Recent developments in multi-voxel pattern analysis（MVPA）  enables us to investigate neural representations using decoding or classification methods. For example, using cross-classification between different modalities, we could investigate invariance or commonalities in neural representations. This paper introduces recent advancements in neuroimaging methods, together with our two studies using MVPA.