Fig. 2. Generating the second-order representational similarity matrix.

Within each participant and neural parcel, (a) neural response patterns elicited by each target-state pair were extracted and (b) compared via Pearson correlation. These correlation coefficients were then organized into target-specific RSMs. Each of these first-order RSMs was (c) Spearman correlated with every other RSM, within and across studies. These values were arctan transformed and organized into a second-order RSM. This second-order neural RSM was entered into suppressed intercept models (Fig. 3).