ArticlePLoS computational biology2020
Understanding multivariate brain activity: Evaluating the effect of voxelwise noise correlations on population codes in functional magnetic resonance imaging.
Article in PLoS computational biology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Cerebellar perturbation impairs human working memory and degrades spatial tuning throughout cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- A neural geometry approach comprehensively explains apparently conflicting models of visual perceptual learning.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Complementary benefits of multivariate and hierarchical models for identifying individual differences in cognitive control.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Complementary benefits of multivariate and hierarchical models for identifying individual differences in cognitive control.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- The impact of functional correlations on task information coding.Network neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Different roles of response covariability and its attentional modulation in the sensory cortex and posterior parietal cortex.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- A large-scale fMRI dataset for the visual processing of naturalistic scenes.Scientific data · 2023Article
- Representational Geometries Reveal Differential Effects of Response Correlations on Population Codes in Neurophysiology and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Age differences in Neural Activation to Face Trustworthiness: Voxel Pattern and Activation Level Assessments.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2021Article
- Deep Generative Analysis for Task-Based Functional MRI Experiments.Proceedings of machine learning research · 2021Article
- Modeling 2D spatio-tactile population receptive fields of the fingertip in human primary somatosensory cortex.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.)Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Previous studies in neurophysiology have shown that neurons exhibit trial-by-trial correlated activity and that such noise correlations (NCs) greatly impact the accuracy of population codes. Meanwhile, multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) has become a mainstream approach in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), but it remains unclear how NCs between voxels influence MVPA performance. Here, we tackle this issue by combining voxel-encoding modeling and MVPA. We focus on a well-established form of NC, tuning-compatible noise correlation (TCNC), whose sign and magnitude are systematically related to the tuning similarity between two units. We show that this form of voxelwise NCs can improve MVPA performance if NCs are sufficiently strong. We also confirm these results using standard information-theoretic analyses in computational neuroscience. In the same theoretical framework, we further demonstrate that the effects of noise correlations at both the neuronal level and the voxel level may manifest differently in typical fMRI data, and their effects are modulated by tuning heterogeneity. Our results provide a theoretical foundation to understand the effect of correlated activity on population codes in macroscopic fMRI data. Our results also suggest that future fMRI research could benefit from a closer examination of the correlational structure of multivariate responses, which is not directly revealed by conventional MVPA approaches.
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