Over the past decade functional Magnetic Resonance
Imaging (fMRI) has emerged as a powerful
technique to locate activity of human brain while
engaged in a particular task or cognitive state. We
consider the inverse problem of detecting the cognitive
state of a human subject based on the fMRI
data. We have explored classification techniques
such as Gaussian Naive Bayes, k-Nearest
Neighbour and Support Vector Machines. In order
to reduce the very high dimensional fMRI data, we
have used three feature selection strategies. Discriminating
features and activity based features
were used to select features for the problem of
identifying the instantaneous cognitive state given
a single fMRI scan and correlation based features
were used when fMRI data from a single time interval
was given. A case study of visuo-motor sequence
learning is presented. The set of cognitive
states we are interested in detecting are whether the
subject has learnt a sequence, and if the subject is
paying attention only towards the position or towards
both the color and position of the visual
stimuli. We have successfully used correlation
based features to detect position-color related cognitive
states with 80% accuracy and the cognitive
states related to learning with 62.5% accuracy