Figure 4.

Results from multilevel mediation analysis. A significant indirect effect of category coactivation was observed (p = 0.005, 95% CI = 0.0031–0.01563), where the relationship between rFG pattern similarity and pre-SMA/dACC activation (total effect: path c; b_{path c} = 0.30237, SE_{path c} = 0.03056, p_{path c} < 0.0001, 95% CI_{path c} = 0.24246–0.36227) was partly accounted for by the extent of category competition as measured behaviorally (MD; reduced effect: path c'; b_{path c′} = 0.2934, SE_{path c′} = 0.0301). This result suggests that visual representations approximating the target category (e.g., male) and its competitor (e.g., female) simultaneously may lead to increased category competition, which in turn leads to stronger engagement of the pre-SMA/dACC. Results were significance tested with a Monte Carlo simulation (10,000 iterations) to estimate confidence intervals for the total and indirect effect (for other effects, *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.0001). Unstandardized betas and their SEs are reported per path.