Mind the BOLD Gap: Why fMRI Models Need More Than a Local Look
TL;DR for operators This paper is not about magically reading the mind from fMRI. Fortunately. We already have enough products pretending to do that. The useful point is narrower and more operational: fMRI signals are distributed across brain regions and stretched across time, so a model that treats them as local snapshots may be structurally under-equipped before training even begins. Kramer, Acharya, Giola, and Zappala adapt an Attentional Neural Integral Equation-style architecture to fMRI encoding and decoding, learning a nonlocal operator in latent space rather than relying only on local filters, short recurrent memory, or fixed graph assumptions.1 ...