The Compositional Nature of Event Representations in the Human Brain (original) (raw)

How does the human brain represent simple compositions of constituents: actors, verbs, objects, directions, and locations? We had subjects view actionsequence videos during neuroimaging (fMRI) sessions and identified lexical descriptions of those videos by decoding the brain representations based only 1 on their fMRI activation patterns. We independently decoded each constituent from a single stimulus presentation and compared the performance of such independent classification to joint classification of the aggregate concepts. Independent classification of constituents performs largely the same as joint classification as measured by accuracy and correlation. The brain regions used for independent constituent classification are largely disjoint and largely cover those used for joint classification. This allows recovery of sentential descriptions of stimulus videos by composing the results of the independent constituent classifiers.

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