Feature-reweighted representational similarity analysis: A method for improving the fit between computational models, brains, and behavior

Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA) has emerged as a popular method for relating representational spaces from human brain activity, behavioral data, and computational models. RSA is based on the comparison of representational (dis-)similarity matrices (RDM or RSM), which characterize the pairwise (dis-)similarities of all conditions across all features (e.g. fMRI voxels or units of a model). However, classical RSA treats each feature as equally important. This equal weights assumption contrasts with the flexibility of multivariate decoding, which reweights individual features for predicting a target variable. As a consequence, classical RSA may lead researchers to underestimate the correspondence between a model and a brain region and, in case of model comparison, may lead them to select an inferior model. The aim of this work is twofold: First, we sought to broadly test feature-reweighted RSA (FR-RSA) applied to computational models and reveal the extent to which reweighting model features improves RSM correspondence and affects model selection. Previous work suggested that reweighting can improve model selection in RSA but it has remained unclear to what extent these results generalize across datasets and data modalities. To draw more general conclusions, we utilized a range of publicly available datasets and three popular deep neural networks (DNNs). Second, we propose voxel-reweighted RSA, a novel use case of FR-RSA that reweights fMRI voxels, mirroring the rationale of multivariate decoding of optimally combining voxel activity patterns. We found that reweighting individual model units markedly improved the fit between model RSMs and target RSMs derived from several fMRI and behavioral datasets and affected model selection, highlighting the importance of considering FR-RSA. For voxel-reweighted RSA, improvements in RSM correspondence were even more pronounced, demonstrating the utility of this novel approach. We additionally show that classical noise ceilings can be exceeded when FR-RSA is applied and propose an updated approach for their computation. Taken together, our results broadly validate the use of FR-RSA for improving the fit between computational models, brain, and behavioral data, possibly allowing us to better adjudicate between competing computational models. Further, our results suggest that FR-RSA applied to brain measurement channels could become an important new method to assess the correspondence between representational spaces.