mind reading and cognitive neuroscience

[neuropsych76]

anyone know where i can find out more about this field?

i know some of the leading names (kay, norman, heeger) but i feel like searching and asking around for "mind reading" makes me sound rather foolish and i won't have much success with that term. is there another term that would yield more hits?

I realize that this topic is very new and extremely limited but i feel like i would enjoy working in a program that does this kind of research. I just can't seem to find much at all so i figured i'd see if anyone had any info on here.

thank you!

[cogneuroforfun]

There is no "mind reading" field. People are using decoding and pattern classifiers to gain more quantitative results from fMRI. The "classic" methods allow you to do contrasts between conditions (how is the BOLD signal different in task A vs. task B vs. control) and see how BOLD responses correlate with behavioral variables (higher activation in region X is correlated with longer reaction time, etc.). Pattern classifiers allow you to get some measure of the information content in the BOLD signal, basically.

"Mind reading" is just training an algorithm to say "this pattern means the subject did X, while this pattern means the subject did Y." Statisticians, not psychologists, develop these types of algorithms. Psychologists simply use them to gain a better understanding of whatever field they're already interested in (vision, memory, whatever).

[cogneuroforfun]

Oh, I realize that might not be exactly what you meant. Lots of groups are looking at decoding neural activity to understand and control prosthetics. My guess is any neuroimaging lab with "computational" in its description will use decoding techniques But you still need to figure out what topic interests you, unless you have the mathematical expertise and interests to seriously develop techniques.

[neuropsych76]

Oh, I realize that might not be exactly what you meant. Lots of groups are looking at decoding neural activity to understand and control prosthetics. My guess is any neuroimaging lab with "computational" in its description will use decoding techniques But you still need to figure out what topic interests you, unless you have the mathematical expertise and interests to seriously develop techniques.

Thank you for the reply, that does help! Decoding neural activity and computational yields many more hits

So, for decoding neural activity your saying lots of math is important? Uh oh.. my math skills are pretty average, will a lack of math prevent me from going into this field?

[cogneuroforfun]

Thank you for the reply, that does help! Decoding neural activity and computational yields many more hits

So, for decoding neural activity your saying lots of math is important? Uh oh.. my math skills are pretty average, will a lack of math prevent me from going into this field?

You certainly don't need tons of math to use these types of analyses in your research. However, to be the one actively developing them, rather than simply applying them, you really need to be a full-on stats PhD person. Statistics develops these techniques (pattern classification, etc.), and psychologists use the techniques to gain a better/deeper understanding of some psychological phenomenon. So saying "I want to do neural decoding" isn't really a research program. Rather, you should be interested in motor planning or memory or visual perception, and you'll use lots of techniques to analyze your experiments: GLMs, decoding, etc. Does that distinction make sense?