Title: The right tool for the right question --- beyond the encoding versus decoding dichotomy,
Abstract: There are two major questions that neuroimaging studies attempt to answer:
First, how are sensory stimuli represented in the brain (which we term the
stimulus-based setting)? And, second, how does the brain generate cognition
(termed the response-based setting)? There has been a lively debate in the
neuroimaging community whether encoding and decoding models can provide
insights into these questions. In this commentary, we construct two simple and
analytically tractable examples to demonstrate that while an encoding model
analysis helps with the former, neither model is appropriate to satisfactorily
answer the latter question. Consequently, we argue that if we want to
understand how the brain generates cognition, we need to move beyond the
encoding versus decoding dichotomy and instead discuss and develop tools that
are specifically tailored to our endeavour.