Relating Brain Structures To Open-Ended Descriptions Of Cognition

Abstract : Finding correspondences between mental processes and brain structures is a central goal in cognitive neuroscience. Neuroimaging provides brain-activity maps associated with cognitive task, however each study explores only a handful of mental processes. Here we use literature mining to bridge results across studies, establishing a bidirectional mapping between brain and mind. Our goal is to work on an open-ended set of terms describing cognitive processes. Moreover we introduce a validation framework using information retrieval met-rics to ensure the accuracy of such correspondences, with a clear focus on relative frequencies, ignored in previous studies , to capture the relative importance of cognitive concepts. We show that this approach enables open-ended encoding and decoding.