TY - JOUR T1 - Decoding brain activity using a large-scale probabilistic functional-anatomical atlas of human cognition JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/059618 SP - 059618 AU - Timothy N. Rubin AU - Oluwasanmi Koyejo AU - Krzysztof J. Gorgolewski AU - Michael N. Jones AU - Russell A. Poldrack AU - Tal Yarkoni Y1 - 2016/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/06/18/059618.abstract N2 - A central goal of cognitive neuroscience is to decode human brain activity--i.e., to infer mental processes from observed patterns of whole-brain activation. Previous decoding efforts have focused on classifying brain activity into a small set of discrete cognitive states. To attain maximal utility, a decoding framework must be open-ended, systematic, and context-sensitive--i.e., capable of interpreting numerous brain states, presented in arbitrary combinations, in light of prior information. Here we take steps towards this objective by introducing a Bayesian decoding framework based on a novel topic model---Generalized Correspondence Latent Dirichlet Allocation---that learns latent topics from a database of over 11,000 published fMRI studies. The model produces highly interpretable, spatially-circumscribed topics that enable flexible decoding of whole-brain images. Importantly, the Bayesian nature of the model allows one to “seed” decoder priors with arbitrary images and text--enabling researchers, for the first time, to generative quantitative, context-sensitive interpretations of whole-brain patterns of brain activity. ER -