Decoding individual identity from brain activity elicited in imagining common experiences. Nat Commun 2020 Nov 20;11(1):5916
Date
11/22/2020Pubmed ID
33219210Pubmed Central ID
PMC7679397DOI
10.1038/s41467-020-19630-yScopus ID
2-s2.0-85096339507 (requires institutional sign-in at Scopus site) 8 CitationsAbstract
Everyone experiences common events differently. This leads to personal memories that presumably provide neural signatures of individual identity when events are reimagined. We present initial evidence that these signatures can be read from brain activity. To do this, we progress beyond previous work that has deployed generic group-level computational semantic models to distinguish between neural representations of different events, but not revealed interpersonal differences in event representations. We scanned 26 participants' brain activity using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging as they vividly imagined themselves personally experiencing 20 common scenarios (e.g., dancing, shopping, wedding). Rather than adopting a one-size-fits-all approach to generically model scenarios, we constructed personal models from participants' verbal descriptions and self-ratings of sensory/motor/cognitive/spatiotemporal and emotional characteristics of the imagined experiences. We demonstrate that participants' neural representations are better predicted by their own models than other peoples'. This showcases how neuroimaging and personalized models can quantify individual-differences in imagined experiences.
Author List
Anderson AJ, McDermott K, Rooks B, Heffner KL, Dodell-Feder D, Lin FVAuthor
Andrew J. Anderson PhD Assistant Professor in the Neurology department at Medical College of WisconsinMESH terms used to index this publication - Major topics in bold
AgedBrain Mapping
Female
Humans
Image Processing, Computer-Assisted
Imagination
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Male
Memory, Long-Term
Nervous System Physiological Phenomena
Semantics
