Thread by @Nancy_Kanwisher

Time to clear up some of the misconceptions and incorrect claims in this thread and accompanying paper:

1. Localization of function and context independence of functional selectivity are not "assumptions” but empirical hypotheses. It does not advance science to replace them with opposite assumptions (as LFB proposes). Rather, we should test these hypotheses against data.

2. First: The claim has never been that a particular mental process engages only a single brain region. Rather, the claim is that many individual brain regions are engaged in single mental processes.

3. The evidence for the functional specificity of many individual brain regions (e.g. the FFA, PPA, EBA, VWFA, TPJ, language regions) has been replicated in 100s of studies in dozens of labs using every method in cognitive neuroscience.

4. The functional specificity of these regions is also not strongly affected by context.

5. The functional selectivity of these brain regions does not suffer from a replicability crisis. Indeed, each functional localizer in each subject is a replication of the original finding.

6. Specificity for particular mental processes or categories is obviously not true of all brain regions, most famously the “multiple demand” system, so named because of the multiplicity of cognitive demands that can engage these regions.

7. But the fact that some brain regions do not have domain-specific functions in no way argues against the domain specificity of those that do.

8. Localization of function in the brain is alive and well.