2022-06-28-toneva22a.md

abstract	booktitle	title	year	layout	series	publisher	issn	id	month	tex_title	firstpage	lastpage	page	order	cycles	bibtex_author	author	date	address	container-title	volume	genre	issued	pdf	extras
To study information processing in the brain, neuroscientists manipulate experimental stimuli while recording participant brain activity. They can then use encoding models to find out which brain "zone" (e.g. which region of interest, volume pixel or electrophysiology sensor) is predicted from the stimulus properties. Given the assumptions underlying this setup, when stimulus properties are predictive of the activity in a zone, these properties are understood to cause activity in that zone. In recent years, researchers have used neural networks to construct representations that capture the diverse properties of complex stimuli, such as natural language or natural images. Encoding models built using these high-dimensional representations are often able to significantly predict the activity in large swathes of cortex, suggesting that the activity in all these brain zones is caused by stimulus properties captured in the representation. It is then natural to ask: "Is the activity in these different brain zones caused by the stimulus properties in the same way?" In neuroscientific terms, this corresponds to asking if these different zones process the stimulus properties in the same way. Here, we propose a new framework that enables researchers to ask if the properties of a stimulus affect two brain zones in the same way. We use simulated data and two real fMRI datasets with complex naturalistic stimuli to show that our framework enables us to make such inferences. Our inferences are strikingly consistent between the two datasets, indicating that the proposed framework is a promising new tool for neuroscientists to understand how information is processed in the brain.	First Conference on Causal Learning and Reasoning	Same Cause; Different Effects in the Brain	2022	inproceedings	Proceedings of Machine Learning Research	PMLR	2640-3498	toneva22a	0	Same Cause; Different Effects in the Brain	787	825	787-825	787	false	Toneva, Mariya and Williams, Jennifer and Bollu, Anand and Dann, Christoph and Wehbe, Leila	given family Mariya Toneva given family Jennifer Williams given family Anand Bollu given family Christoph Dann given family Leila Wehbe	2022-06-28		Proceedings of the First Conference on Causal Learning and Reasoning	177	inproceedings	date-parts 2022 6 28	https://proceedings.mlr.press/v177/toneva22a/toneva22a.pdf