Russell Poldrack

Who they are

The work of Russell Poldrack reaches this site through the papers listed below. On this site the name is tied to Reverse Inference, Selectivity of a Brain Region.

Key papers

Poldrack, R. A. (2006). Can cognitive processes be inferred from neuroimaging data? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10(2), 59-63. What it reports: The paper uses Bayesian reasoning to show that the reliability of inferring a cognitive process from activation depends on the selectivity of the region, meaning how often activation there reflects the process of interest compared with other tasks.

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. What it reports: An automated framework mined published imaging papers and pooled 100,953 activation points from 3,489 studies. Forward and reverse maps differed, and a classifier recovered broad task types from single maps but could not separate closely related terms.

Key ideas

Reverse Inference: Reasoning from a measured pattern back to a feeling or mental state, which needs its own evidence.

Selectivity of a Brain Region: How much more often a region responds to one process than to others.

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