Exactly. Our tooling doesn't even allow us to make clear inferences about neuronal activity yet - all we can image with fMRI as of today is heamodynamics.
The work proposes that because responses to difference visual stimuli show the same haemodynamic spatiotemporal response in memory areas, the actual memories must share a common representation.
This is debatable since we know that localized spatiotemporal responses reflect the variability in the vascular tree and blood flow and volume, regardless of the experiment at hand [see 1 for a discussion]. To dare to claim that effects could be neuronal one needs to run a bunch of extra control experiments (vascular reactivity mapping / breathhold hypercapnic challenges, resting-state imaging as a control dataset), none of which were conducted in the proposed work.
This is known to MR physicists, but hasn't clicked in yet within departments of cognitive neuroscience.
The work proposes that because responses to difference visual stimuli show the same haemodynamic spatiotemporal response in memory areas, the actual memories must share a common representation. This is debatable since we know that localized spatiotemporal responses reflect the variability in the vascular tree and blood flow and volume, regardless of the experiment at hand [see 1 for a discussion]. To dare to claim that effects could be neuronal one needs to run a bunch of extra control experiments (vascular reactivity mapping / breathhold hypercapnic challenges, resting-state imaging as a control dataset), none of which were conducted in the proposed work.
This is known to MR physicists, but hasn't clicked in yet within departments of cognitive neuroscience.
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2020.5960...