Decoding semantic representations in mind and brain

State-of-the-art brain imaging studies have recently produced a variety of sometimes contradictory conclusions about the neural systems that support human semantic memory.Multivariate techniques deployed in this work adopt implicit or explicit assumptions that limit the types of signal they can detect, and thus the types of hypotheses they can test.We lay out the space of possible cognitive and neural representations and then critically review contemporary methods to determine which analyses can test which hypotheses.The results account for the heterogeneity of recent findings and identify an important empirical and methodological gap that makes it difficult to connect the imaging literature to neurocomputational models of semantic processing.