A comparison of volume-based and surface-based multi-voxel pattern analysis

In our example data set, participants pressed one of four fingers while undergoing fMRI. We used MVPA to identify regions in which local fMRI patterns can successfully discriminate which finger was moved. We show that surface-based information mapping is a more sensitive measure of local information content, and provides better spatial selectivity. This makes surface-based information mapping a useful technique for a data-driven analysis of information representation in the cerebral cortex.