Conversely (2), if the representations supporting language understanding in the brain are not linearly decodable from fMRI, we should be able to demonstrate this fact by showing specific ablations of sentence representation models do not degrade in brain decoding performance.
the brain decoding framework offers possibilities both for (1) discriminating among NLU tasks as faithful characterizations of human language understanding, and for (2) understanding potential limitations of fMRI imaging and linear decoding methods.