Uncorrected Proof Functional Neuroimaging and Psychology: What Have You Done for Me Lately? Joseph M. Moran and Jamil Zaki Abstract ■ Functional imaging has become a primary tool in the study of human psychology but is not without its detractors. Although cognitive neuroscientists have made great strides in under- standing the neural instantiation of countless cognitive pro- cesses, commentators have sometimes argued that functional imaging provides little or no utility for psychologists. And indeed, myriad studies over the last quarter century have employed the technique of brain mapping—identifying the neural correlates of various psychological phenomena—in ways that bear mini- mally on psychological theory. How can brain mapping be made more relevant to behavioral scientists broadly? Here, we describe three trends that increase precisely this relevance: (i) the use of neuroimaging data to adjudicate between competing psycholog- ical theories through forward inference, (ii) isolating neural markers of information processing steps to better understand complex tasks and psychological phenomena through probabi- listic reverse inference, and (iii) using brain activity to predict subsequent behavior. Critically, these new approaches build on the extensive tradition of brain mapping, suggesting that efforts in this area—although not initially maximally relevant to psychology—can indeed be used in ways that constrain and advance psychological theory. ■ INTRODUCTION Scientists have measured blood flow in the living human brain for over 50 years (Ingvar & Lassen, 1961). In the last quarter century, however, the use of noninvasive tech- niques such as PET and (later) fMRI has exploded, and these techniques have emerged as near-ubiquitous meth- ods in the psychologistʼs toolkit. fMRI and PET have been applied to domains as diverse as lie detection and love in search of the ever-elusive neural correlates of X. But, like Brussels sprouts at Thanksgiving dinner, some have won- dered whether functional imaging really does complement the bird or serves solely as an attractive yet unpalatable gar- nish to the broader enterprise of psychological research. For instance, in a classic commentary on the study of emo- tion, Lazarus (1984) wrote that “[e]fforts to deal with areas of confusion in psychological theory by reduction to anat- omy and physiology usually represent an attempt to clarify obscurities at one level of analysis by reference to obscuri- ties at another.” (p. 128). Lazarusʼ views are shared by many psychologists who often view neuroimaging as only du- biously relevant to their questions of interest. As these techniques reach the age of majority, it is worth taking stock of whether neuroimaging has matured enough to contribute meaningfully to psychology. This reflection is especially pertinent given the colli- sion of two tides in the general view of neuroimaging. On the one hand, people rate scientific explanations of psychological phenomena as more satisfying when they contain “brain scan” information—even when that infor- mation is logically unrelated to the explanation at hand (McCabe & Castel, 2008; Weisberg, Keil, Goodstein, Rawson, & Gray, 2008). On the other hand, members of the scientific community have invoked voodoo (Vul, Harris, Winkielman, & Pashler, 2009) and dead salmon (Bennett, Baird, Wolford, & Miller, 2010) in leveling frequent charges that neuro- imaging has not (Coltheart, 2006; Cacioppo et al., 2003) or even cannot (Gul & Pesendorfer, 2008) constrain our under- standing of psychological processes. Henson (2005, 2006) eloquently answered several such criticisms by outlining specific ways in which neuroimaging data can be brought to bear on theories at the psychological level of explanation. However, Hensonʼs insights and those of others (e.g., Poldrack, 2006) have too often been ignored by both sides of the imaging hullaballoo: Critics have often failed to rec- ognize some valid applications of neuroimaging, and neuro- imaging has often been wielded in a manner ill-befitting its real utility. The aims of the present article are thus simple. We will ar- gue that the tradition of brain mapping in neuroimaging— although potentially a powerful source of insight for psychologists—has often been used in ways that provide little or no power to constrain psychological theory. Much of the data available from brain mapping studies do little to help psychologists working in classic cognitive domains (such as memory) to inform and advance information pro- cessing models. We believe that this observation has led some psychologists to take an overly cynical stance on the ability of imaging to make such contributions. Recent advances in neuroimaging design and analysis techniques Harvard University © Massachusetts Institute of Technology Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience X:Y, pp. 1–9 doi:10.1162/jocn_a_00380