Future studies should investigate the use of slower feedback update rates. Fourth, adjusting the relative contribution of attended and unattended pictures based on decoder output did not allow us to dissociate between the effect of neurofeedback and the effect of change in BOLD signal due to change in the perceptual input. Future neurofeedback designs should avoid changing object properties by using a more abstract neurofeedback such as adjusting the color of the background surrounding the hybrid picture depending on the results of the decoding. Finally, a decoder trained on separately presented pictures of faces and places might not be the optimal way of investigating

the effects of neurofeedback. This is because a decoder trained on faces and places will recruit only those regions that it finds useful for distinguishing between GSK2118436 price face and place pictures. Presenting decoder output as neurofeedback to the subjects may have little impact on their task performance because the regions that respond to neurofeedback may not be incorporated in the decoding model trained on just faces and places. Hence, even if the subject’s brain MDV3100 supplier is responding to neurofeedback, the decoder may be unable to detect it. Therefore, it is necessary that future studies using MVPA-generated neurofeedback could aim to incorporate the brain regions

responsible for processing feedback into the model. In case of whole-brain decoding, nine regions were consistently used by the classifier

to drive the predictions. Among these regions was the left fusiform gyrus, which is usually associated with reading and word processing (McCandliss et al., 2003; Hillis et al., 2005; Dehaene & Cohen, 2011). However, this area has also been suggested to be sensitive to the conjunction of object and background scene information (Goh et al., 2004). This view is strengthened by invasive studies in primates that also pointed to the Abiraterone presence of neurons in this area, which are responsive to the conjunction of object features (Baker et al., 2002; Brincat & Connor, 2004). The left fusiform gyrus may be showing more activity for place blocks than for face blocks because pictures of famous places in the stimulus set contained not only objects but also a wide variety of backgrounds. Pictures used in the face blocks rarely had objects in them. The right fusiform gyrus showed a preference for face blocks, whereas the left parahippocampal gyrus showed a preference for place blocks. These two regions have been implicated in many studies to be responsible for the processing of faces and places, respectively (Aguirre et al., 1996, 1998; Kanwisher et al., 1997; McCarthy et al., 1997; Epstein & Kanwisher, 1998). Furthermore, bilateral ligual gyri were also activated for place pictures. The lingual gyrus performs bottom-up perceptual analysis of a scene in order to recognize it.