{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/does-the-brain-represent-words-an-evaluation","title":"Does the brain represent words? An evaluation of brain decoding studies of language understanding","arxiv_id":"1806.00591","date":"2018-06-02","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jon Gauthier","Anna Ivanova"],"abstract":"Language decoding studies have identified word representations which can be\nused to predict brain activity in response to novel words and sentences\n(Anderson et al., 2016; Pereira et al., 2018). The unspoken assumption of these\nstudies is that, during processing, linguistic information is transformed into\nsome shared semantic space, and those semantic representations are then used\nfor a variety of linguistic and non-linguistic tasks. We claim that current\nstudies vastly underdetermine the content of these representations, the\nalgorithms which the brain deploys to produce and consume them, and the\ncomputational tasks which they are designed to solve. We illustrate this\nindeterminacy with an extension of the sentence-decoding experiment of Pereira\net al. (2018), showing how standard evaluations fail to distinguish between\nlanguage processing models which deploy different mechanisms and which are\noptimized to solve very different tasks. We conclude by suggesting changes to\nthe brain decoding paradigm which can support stronger claims of neural\nrepresentation.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1806.00591v1","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.00591v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"does-the-brain-represent-words-an-evaluation","repo_url":"https://github.com/hans/nn-decoding","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"tf","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"brain-decoding","task_name":"Brain Decoding"},{"task_slug":"sentence","task_name":"Sentence"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1806.00591","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}