Well, Max Coldheart in one challenge, in 2006,
in a nice series of challenge and reply papers, posed this question.
Perhaps functional neuroimaging hasn't taught us anything about the brain so
far [LAUGH].
So, that's one extreme view and I'll let you go through those replies yourself and
see what you think.
But I think, that reverse inference can be done, it's just not very easy.
So, here are two strategies, and
one strategy is to leverage what we know about neuroscience.
So, if you have strong prior knowledge about what does or
doesn't activate a particular brain area,
then activation of that area becomes an interesting answer.
I'll show you an example of that.
And the second strategy is what we'll call quantitative reverse inference.
Which is, we have a brain marker, maybe it's activation of a region like
the caudate, and we assess that activity across our candidate set of tasks.
We can quantify a sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value.
And this might require testing across many task contexts and study populations.
So it's not the job of one study but the job of many studies together.