Identifying natural images from human brain activity

Kendrick N. Kay, Thomas Naselaris, Ryan J. Prenger and Jack L. Gallant ()
Additional contact information
Kendrick N. Kay: University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
Thomas Naselaris: Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
Ryan J. Prenger: University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
Jack L. Gallant: University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA

Nature, 2008, vol. 452, issue 7185, 352-355

Abstract: Reading the mind Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have shown that, based on patterns of activity evoked by different categories of visual images, it is possible to deduce simple features in the visual scene, or to which category it belongs. Kay et al. take this approach a tantalizing step further. Their newly developed decoding method, based on quantitative receptive field models that characterize the relationship between visual stimuli and fMRI activity in early visual areas, can identify with high accuracy which specific natural image an observer saw, even for an image chosen at random from 1,000 distinct images. This prompts the thought that it may soon be possible to decode subjective perceptual experiences such as visual imagery and dreams, an idea previously restricted to the realm of science fiction.

Date: 2008
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature06713 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:452:y:2008:i:7185:d:10.1038_nature06713

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/nature06713

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().