Scientists Predicting Intentions

An anonymous reader writes to tell us German scientists claim to have the means of predicting decisions of high level mental activity. "In the past, experts had been able to detect decisions about making physical movements in advance. But researchers at Berlin's Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience claim they have now, for the first time, identified people's decisions about how they would later do a high-level mental activity _ in this case, adding versus subtracting."

Re:Suspicion

[venicebeach]

Also, fMRI will never be able to predict intentions in real time due to the hemodynamic lag, and is currently practically impossible to analyze online due technical limitations. What they did was use information which occured before the decision to predict which decision was later made. However, this analysis was done after the decision was made . That is to say, after the scans were over, the data from the few seconds before the decision was found to be predictive of which way the decision went. So it's not like they really knew what was going to happen before it did.

Actual research article

[FleaPlus]

As usual, the linked artice is sparse on actual details. Here's a link to the actual article in Current Biology:

http://www.current-biology.com/content/article/abs tract?uid=PIIS0960982206026583&highlight=haynes [current-biology.com]

The full text requires a subscription, but I've pasted the abstract below:

Reading Hidden Intentions in the Human Brain

When humans are engaged in goal-related processing, activity in prefrontal cortex is increased [1, 2]. However, it has remained unclear whether this prefrontal activity encodes a subject's current intention [3]. Instead, increased levels of activity could reflect preparation of motor responses [4, 5], holding in mind a set of potential choices [6], tracking the memory of previous responses [7], or general processes related to establishing a new task set. Here we study subjects who freely decided which of two tasks to perform and covertly held onto an intention during a variable delay. Only after this delay did they perform the chosen task and indicate which task they had prepared. We demonstrate that during the delay, it is possible to decode from activity in medial and lateral regions of prefrontal cortex which of two tasks the subjects were covertly intending to perform. This suggests that covert goals can be represented by distributed patterns of activity in the prefrontal cortex, thereby providing a potential neural substrate for prospective memory [8, 9, 10]. During task execution, most information could be decoded from a more posterior region of prefrontal cortex, suggesting that different brain regions encode goals during task preparation and task execution. Decoding of intentions was most robust from the medial prefrontal cortex, which is consistent with a specific role of this region when subjects reflect on their own mental states.

Also, the final paragraph from the conclusion, which discusses where they'd like to go with this in the future:

Taken together, our results extend previous studies on the processing of goals in prefrontal cortex in several important ways. They reveal for the first time that spatial response patterns in medial and lateral prefrontal cortex encode a subject's covert intentions in a highly specific fashion. They also demonstrate a functional separation in medial prefrontal cortex, where more anterior regions encode the intention prior to its execution and more posterior regions encode the intention during task execution. These findings have important implications not only for the neural models of executive control, but also for technical and clinical applications, such as the further development of brain-computer interfaces, that might now be able to decode intentions that go beyond simple movements and extend to high-level cognitive processes.