From brain maps to cognitive ontologies: informatics and the search for mental structure

By Russell A. Poldrack, Tal Yarkoni. Annual Review of Psychology, 2015

316 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A major goal of cognitive neuroscience is to delineate how brain systems give rise to mental function. Here we review the increasingly large role informatics-driven approaches are playing in such efforts. We begin by reviewing a number of challenges conventional neuroimaging approaches face in trying to delineate brain-cognition mappings—for example, the difficulty in establishing the specificity of postulated associations. Next, we demonstrate how these limitations can potentially be overcome using complementary approaches that emphasize large-scale analysis—including meta-analytic methods that synthesize hundreds or thousands of studies at a time; latent-variable approaches that seek to extract structure from data in a bottom-up manner; and predictive modeling approaches capable of quantitatively inferring mental states from patterns of brain activity. We highlight the underappreciated but critical role for formal cognitive ontologies in helping to clarify, refine, and test theories of brain and cognitive function. Finally, we conclude with a speculative discussion of what future informatics developments may hold for cognitive neuroscience.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Neuroscience, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/191097d219a6a9848ed67de565e9d3b56fa116ff

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Citations in the corpus

The modular and integrative functional architecture of the human brain (2015, background): “This has been a difficult goal to achieve for numerous reasons (97–104), foremost being the significant challenge of building an ontology of cognitive functions (105).”
On testing for spatial correspondence between maps of human brain structure and function (2018, unknown): “org/concepts) (Poldrack and Yarkoni, 2016; Poldrack et al., 2011), which resulted in 120 terms.”
Cognitive computational neuroscience (2018, methodology): “Modern meta-analysis techniques for brain imaging data enable us to go beyond localization of predefined cognitive components and learn about the way cognition is decomposed into component functions.(14) The field”
Comparing spatial null models for brain maps (2021, unknown): “…to terms that overlapped with those deﬁned in the Cognitive Atlas, an ontological database for deﬁning and relating cognitive processes ( https://www.cognitiveatlas.org/concepts ; Poldrack 2011; Poldrack et al. 2011; Poldrack and Yarkoni 2016 ; refer to Table S1 for a full list of terms).”