Decoding the subjective rotation direction of the spinning dancer from fMRI data

Sutao Song, Yang Liu, Jiacai Zhang

Abstract: A challenging goal in neuroscience is to decode the mental states from brain activity. Recently, researchers have successfully deciphered the objective and static visual stimuli (such as orientation of stripes and category of objects) from brain activity recorded by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology. However, few studies focused on the decoding of the rotation direction perception of the actual three-dimensional world with two-dimensional representations. In this study, the brain activities when subjects viewed the animation of the spinning dancer in the front were recorded using fMRI, and subjects reported the viewing-from-bottom motion direction (clockwise or counterclockwise) by press different buttons. One multivariate pattern analysis method, support vector machine was trained to predict the rotation direction. The 5-fold cross-validation result showed that the subjective rotation direction reported by the subjects can be predicted from fMRI with a possibility above the chance level, which imply that fMRI activity of the brain contains detailed rotation direction information that can reliably predict the subjective perception.