ABSTRACT
Brain imaging technologies have been enthusiastically embraced not only by the scientific and medical community but also by the public, whose awareness of them is fed principally by popular media reports of neuroscientific methods and findings (see Weisberg 2008: 51-6). The images they help to generate are regarded as being epistemologically compelling (see Roskies 2007: 860-72) and are believed to have a particularly persuasive influence on the public perception of research on cognition (see Dumit 2004; McCabe and Castel 2008: 347-52; Weisberg 2008; Keehner et al. 2011: 422-8). However, a number of empirical studies have questioned the widespread assumption of the persuasiveness of brain images (see Michael et al. 2013: 720-5).
