Tal Yarkoni

Tal Yarkoni

Tal Yarkoni is a researcher in psychology and first author of a 2011 paper on large-scale automated synthesis of neuroimaging data.

Who they are

The work of Tal Yarkoni reaches this site through the papers listed below. On this site the name is tied to Large-Scale Decoding, Selectivity of a Brain Region.

Key papers

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.

Chang, L. J., Yarkoni, T., Khaw, M. W., & Sanfey, A. G. (2013). Decoding the role of the insula in human cognition: Functional parcellation and large-scale reverse inference. Cerebral Cortex, 23(3), 739-749. What it reports: The study combined connectivity-based parcellation of the insula with large-scale meta-analytic decoding and supported three subregions, each linked to a distinct function.

Key ideas

Large-Scale Decoding: Using patterns of activity pooled from many studies to estimate which mental process an activation map reflects.

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

Sources

  1. 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.
  2. Chang, L. J., Yarkoni, T., Khaw, M. W., & Sanfey, A. G. (2013). Decoding the role of the insula in human cognition: Functional parcellation and large-scale reverse inference. Cerebral Cortex, 23(3), 739-749.