Individual differences shape conceptual representation in the brain.

ABSTRACT: Each person experiences the world through a unique conceptual lens, shaped by personal experiences, natural variations, or disease. These individual differences have remained largely inaccessible to cognitive neuroscience and clinical neurology, limiting the development of precision medicine approaches to cognitive disorders. To overcome this limitation, here we develop a new statistical framework to measure and interpret individual differences in functional brain representations. We apply this framework to characterize how different individuals represent the same concepts. Twenty-four participants listened to narrative stories while their brain activity was measured with functional MRI (fMRI). Encoding models were used to recover how hundreds of concepts were represented in each person's

SUBMITTER: Visconti di Oleggio Castello M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12393518 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature