  Similar to how differences in the proficiency of the cardiovascular and
musculoskeletal system predict an individual's athletic ability, differences in
how the same brain region encodes information across individuals may explain
their behavior. However, when studying how the brain encodes information,
researchers choose different neuroimaging tasks (e.g., language or motor
tasks), which can rely on processing different types of information and can
modulate different brain regions. We hypothesize that individual differences in
how information is encoded in the brain are task-specific and predict different
behavior measures. We propose a framework using encoding-models to identify
individual differences in brain encoding and test if these differences can
predict behavior. We evaluate our framework using task functional magnetic
resonance imaging data. Our results indicate that individual differences
revealed by encoding-models are a powerful tool for predicting behavior, and
that researchers should optimize their choice of task and encoding-model for
their behavior of interest.
