  Researchers in functional neuroimaging mostly use activation coordinates to
formulate their hypotheses. Instead, we propose to use the full statistical
images to define regions of interest (ROIs). This paper presents two machine
learning approaches, transfer learning and selection transfer, that are
compared upon their ability to identify the common patterns between brain
activation maps related to two functional tasks. We provide some preliminary
quantification of these similarities, and show that selection transfer makes it
possible to set a spatial scale yielding ROIs that are more specific to the
context of interest than with transfer learning. In particular, selection
transfer outlines well known regions such as the Visual Word Form Area when
discriminating between different visual tasks.
