stimulus

Definition

The input presented to a participant in an experiment — an image, a sound, a sentence. Studies relate properties of the stimulus to recorded brain activity in order to infer what the brain encodes and when. The plural is stimuli, and functionally a stimulus plays the role an input example plays in machine learning: the controlled thing you vary to see what changes.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Walkthrough: Interpretable MEG Decoding of Perceived Speech — Reading the Decoder's Weights as a Brain MapInterpretable MEG Decoding of Perceived Speech: Cortical Sources and the Stimulus Features That Drive Retrieval