The article by Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, Rainer Goebel, and Peter Bandettini introduces a novel approach to functional brain mapping called information-based functional brain mapping. This method aims to identify regions in the brain where the activity pattern changes in response to experimental conditions, rather than focusing solely on regions with spatially averaged activity changes (activation-based approach). The authors propose using a "searchlight" technique, which scans the brain volume with a multivariate statistic at each voxel, combining signals from multiple voxels to detect fine-scale activity patterns. They demonstrate that this approach is more sensitive to focally distributed effects and can better capture fine-grained pattern effects, which are often missed by traditional activation-based methods. The study uses both simulated and real fMRI data to validate the effectiveness of the information-based mapping technique, showing that it can detect regions with category-selective information that are not identified by activation-based mapping. The authors conclude that information-based mapping is particularly useful for experiments targeting distributed representations and can be applied to various domains of neuroscience research.The article by Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, Rainer Goebel, and Peter Bandettini introduces a novel approach to functional brain mapping called information-based functional brain mapping. This method aims to identify regions in the brain where the activity pattern changes in response to experimental conditions, rather than focusing solely on regions with spatially averaged activity changes (activation-based approach). The authors propose using a "searchlight" technique, which scans the brain volume with a multivariate statistic at each voxel, combining signals from multiple voxels to detect fine-scale activity patterns. They demonstrate that this approach is more sensitive to focally distributed effects and can better capture fine-grained pattern effects, which are often missed by traditional activation-based methods. The study uses both simulated and real fMRI data to validate the effectiveness of the information-based mapping technique, showing that it can detect regions with category-selective information that are not identified by activation-based mapping. The authors conclude that information-based mapping is particularly useful for experiments targeting distributed representations and can be applied to various domains of neuroscience research.