Nonetheless, neuroimaging can provide answers to more complex situations such as how to determine if two different tasks take part in a mutual or distinct processing mechanism or how much distinction can be established between the representations of two different cognitive tasks as mentioned by Mather et …show more content…
Contrary to the idea dispersed by Uttal’s (2001) book, fMRI and neuroimaging in general is not the phrenology of the twenty-first century. In a literature survey perform by Tressoldi et al. (2012), he and his colleagues discovered that 11.2% of the fMRI studies conducted between 2007 and 2011 aimed to differentiate between conflicting psychological theories or support some psychological theory. After filtering the studies following his defined method, they narrow the studies down to a total of 20. Within the 20 studies, there were eleven that suffered from consistency fallacy. The remaining nine were indeed good examples of neuroimaging data being use to inform cognitive theory. One of the nine was a study perform by Greene and Paxton (2009) in which they tested the validity of the “will” hypothesis and the “grace” hypothesis. Although the literature survey conducted by Tressoldi showed that the vast majority of fMRI data is use mostly for localization studies, there still limited evidence that in principle Neuroimaging can indeed inform and help in the formation, testing and refinement of cognitive