The techniques, known as multivoxel
pattern analysis and representational dissimilarity analysis, showed which songs Sting found similar to one another and which ones are dissimilar — based not on
tests or questionnaires, but on
activations of
brain regions.
Children with the lowest scores on the social cognition
tests showed atypical responses to the unknown words — no response at all, for example, or activity in a different part of the
brain, while those with the higher scores showed a more typical
pattern of
brain activation in the left hemisphere, the authors report online today in PLOS ONE.