Bridging the gap between physiology and functional magnetic resonance imaging

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) provides data from multiple areas of the brain enabling studies of large-scale activation patterns. Interestingly, fMRI can show physiologically and computationally meaningful results, such as tuning functions for visual field position [1, 2] and spatial frequency [3]. Moreover, information from cortical activation patterns enable decoding visual objects [4] or imagined concepts [5], indicating that macroscopic patterns contain information about sensory stimuli. In addition, interaction between fMRI responses suggests implementation of efficient sensory coding principles at macroscopic scale [6].

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