Distinguishing abstract from concrete concepts in supramodal brain regions.

Concrete words have been shown to have a processing advantage over abstract words, yet theoretical accounts and neural correlates underlying the distinction between concrete and abstract concepts are still unresolved. In an fMRI study, participants performed a property verification task on abstract and concrete concepts. Property comparisons of concrete concepts were predominantly based on either visual or haptic features.

Representations of modality-specific affective processing for visual and auditory stimuli derived from functional magnetic resonance imaging data.

There is converging evidence that people rapidly and automatically encode affective dimensions of objects, events, and environments that they encounter in the normal course of their daily routines. An important research question is whether affective representations differ with sensory modality. This research examined the nature of the dependency of affect and sensory modality at a whole-brain level of analysis in an incidental affective processing paradigm.

Decoding abstract and concrete concept representations based on single-trial fMRI data.

Previously, multi-voxel pattern analysis has been used to decode words referring to concrete object categories. In this study we investigated if single-trial-based brain activity was sufficient to distinguish abstract (e.g.

Decoding the neural representation of affective states.

Brain activity was monitored while participants viewed picture sets that reflected high or low levels of arousal and positive, neutral, or negative valence. Pictures within a set were presented rapidly in an incidental viewing task while fMRI data were collected. The primary purpose of the study was to determine if multi-voxel pattern analysis could be used within and between participants to predict valence, arousal and combined affective states elicited by pictures based on distributed patterns of whole brain activity.