Selectivity of a Brain Region

Selectivity of a Brain Region

Reviewed by Faisal Zaidi

How much more often a region responds to one process than to others.

What it is

Russell Poldrack's 2006 analysis ties the strength of a reverse inference to this property: a region active in many kinds of task tells a reader little about any single state. Tal Yarkoni and colleagues later showed, with forward and reverse maps drawn from 3,489 studies, that consistent activity and selective activity are different properties.

In effect

In the article on reverse inference in neuroscience, selectivity is the base rate that decides how far a claim about a region can be trusted.

What it does not say

Selectivity is a matter of degree and depends on the task setting. It does not say that a region with low selectivity does nothing of interest.

Sources

  1. Poldrack, R. A. (2006). Can cognitive processes be inferred from neuroimaging data? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10(2), 59-63.
  2. Yarkoni, T., Poldrack, R. A., Nichols, T. E., Van Essen, D. C., & Wager, T. D. (2011). Large-scale automated synthesis of human functional neuroimaging data. Nature Methods, 8(8), 665-670.