Imaging natural cognition: concepts and progress in Mobile Brain/Body Imaging (MoBI)

COEX 

Our brains have evolved to optimize the outcomes of our behavior. Fifteen years ago, based on our research on EEG source imaging, I and my colleagues proposed that it was time that human cognitive neuroscience broke out of its confining box in which participant heads are held rigidly still during experiments designed to record only very low-dimensional behavior (e.g., sparse, minimal button press actions). As our ICA decomposition technique can separate activity recorded in scalp EEG from eye movements, muscle activity, and cortical activity, it was now possible to collect and analyze high-density EEG data from participants who were performing naturally motivated actions in 3D environments, thereby offering a first opportunity to study the natural cognition of humans. I believed this to be the natural progression from 19th century psychophysics through 20th century psychophysiology to a new (21st century) era of what I called mobile brain/body imaging or MoBI, recording What the brain does (using EEG), What the brain experiences (using scene and event recording), and What the brain controls (using high-definition body and eye movement recording) during a wide range of possible tasks and scenarios. The intervening decade and a half have confirmed the importance and widespread interest in experiments involving multimodal recording to advance cognitive and medical neuroscience understanding. Continuing progress in microelectronics have made mobile recording ever more convenient and less expensive to perform. There has been perhaps less progress in developing mathematical tools marrying kinetics and biomechanics models to models of brain activity - an important task for the future whose potential value is dramatized by the recent successes of deep learning approaches.