Reverse correlation technique

The reverse correlation technique is a data driven study method used primarily in psychological and neurophysiological research.^[1] This method earned its name from its origins in neurophysiology, where cross-correlations between white noise stimuli and sparsely occurring neuronal spikes could be computed quicker when only computing it for segments preceding the spikes.^[1][2][3] The term has since been adopted in psychological experiments that usually do not analyze the temporal dimension, but also present noise to human participants. In contrast to the original meaning, the term is here thought to reflect that the standard psychological practice of presenting stimuli of defined categories to the participants is "reversed": Instead, the participant's mental representations of categories are estimated from interactions of the presented noise and the behavioral responses.^[4] It is used to create composite pictures of individual and/or group mental representations of various items (e.g. faces,^[5] bodies,^[6] and the self^[7]) that depict characteristics of said items (e.g. trustworthiness^[8] and self-body image^[9]). This technique is helpful when evaluating the mental representations of those with and without mental illnesses.^[10]