Summary
It is obvious that in the case of criticisms 1 and 3, the
reviewer read only the titles, and ignored the body of these
completely. For criticism 1, he simply reiterate the
assumptions of Howard et al, with additional bizarre comment.
For criticism 3, he simply discusses another potential
criticism of Howard et al, which has nothing to do with my
criticism.
In the case of criticism 2, the reviewer try to refute it with a
broken logic and irrelevant examples, and then branch to an irrelevant
discussion.
In short, the reviewer did not answer any of the criticisms I raised.
1) The authors ignore the higher level nature of the stimuli, i.e
their conceptual emotional significance
- [1] "It is unlikely that MT/MST would be much affected by emotional
significance...."
- The reviewer just reiterate the assumption of Howard et
al. This assumption is not supported by any evidence or a logical
argument.
- [2] "and it is not clear what "conceptual" significance means
....."
- This sentence is really bizarre. One of the stimuli of Howard
et al is an uninterpretable pattern, one looks like distant
lights in the dark, and one is a moving person. Apparently the
reviewer does not see "conceptual" difference between a person and an
uninterpretable pattern.
This sentence also shows that the reviewer did not read the body of the
criticism. If the reviewer have read this, he would have found several
examples of "conceptual" significance in the first sentence.
2) The authors assume that high differential activity is
equivalent to functional significance.
[3] "On the one hand, this argument is not really valid."
- The reviewer tries to refute my criticism by bringing few
examples. That is broken logic. My argument is that high activity and
functional significance are not equivalent, but that does not mean
they are contradictory. Thus even if the argument is true, we would
still expect to find few cases when activity and functional
significance co-localize. Thus bringing few examples of
co-localization does not refute the argument. In Howard et al,
the underlying assumption is that high activity and functional
significance are equivalent, and to prove that the reviewer has to
show that these two co-localize consistently in almost all cases.
In addition, both of the examples that the reviewer brings are not
relevant, as discussed next.
- [4] "In the extreme case, switching from auditory to a visual
stimulus will cause overall activation to switch from auditory cortex
to visual cortex."
- This example is not relevant. The first important point is the
localization of audio and visual signals is at a resolution of much
more coarse grain (several cm) than the resolution of the results of
Howard et al. I explicitly state that the criticism is about
the assumption of equivalence at the resolution that Howard et al
present their data (second sentence of the second paragraph of
criticism 2). The reviewer simply ignores this.
The second point is that this case is not only extreme, but also
special, because the localization is a result of input entering the
cortex in different locations. It is thus not possible to generalize
from it to other cases.
- [5] "For example, if cells in a region of the cortex respond only
to color stimuli, ...."
- This example is not relevant, from the same two reasons that the
previous example is not relevant. The resolution of the color
sensitive regions is again at the range of cm. Even though the
reviewer regard color as just a "submodality", color is a very special
"submodality". It is one of the two major variables that humans
identify in the visual input ( the other is intensity), it is
'recognized' already at the level of the receptors, and part of the
path from the eye to cortex seems to specialize in high color
sensitivity.
- [6] "The criticism in its most general form could be applied to all
previous and future studies of brain imaging."
- Agreed. Because the criticism can be applied to all studies, it is
important to discuss it seriously, rather than dismiss it with an irrelevant
discussion, which is what the reviewer is going to do next.
- [7] "What the criticism really means is that a negative result
using brain might not mean very much."
- Wrong. The argument is equally relevant to the positive and
negative case, and I explicitly suggested what could be the reasons
for obtaining false positives. The reviewer does not give any reason
why the argument is not applicable to the positive result case, and simply
evade the point by branching into an irrelevant discussion of the
negative result case.
- [8] "Zeki, fortunately, has a positive result."
- But the reviewer does not discuss this case at all.
The authors regard localization as specialization.
- [9] "An area activated while subjects view biological motion,
for example, might be equally activated when subjects view a motion
stimulus that was not tested. this is similar to the negative result
argument above."
- This is another potential criticism of Howard et al, and
has nothing to do with my criticism. Obviously, the reviewer has not
read the body of the third criticism, as there is no relation between
his comments and what I wrote.