Mobile Brain/Body Imaging of Spatial Navigation

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Klaus Gramann
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology ; Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience
• Term: from 2016 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 321967722

The goal of this proposal is to investigate the cortical dynamics that support spatial orienting during active human movement in space reflecting the integration of idiothetic information from the visual, the vestibular, and the kinesthetic system. This overall objective shall help to develop theories of spatial navigation and how different senses contribute to spatial orienting. Furthermore, the proposed experiments aim at modeling the brain dynamics accompanying visual and vestibular information on physical rotation and translation in space, and how these contribute to spatial updating. Finally, investigating the brain dynamics originating in or near the retrosplenial complex (RSC), a brain structure that is central to spatial orienting, will contribute to identifying potential different computational functions of this structure. To this end, we will compare active physical spatial orienting with visual flow orienting in a series of experiments. To record the human brain dynamics during mobile spatial orienting electroencephalography (EEG), full-body motion capture, and head mounted virtual reality will be synchronized. To image the recorded activity, data-driven analyses approaches will be used to investigate the interdependencies between human brain dynamics, physical movement, and cognitive processes. The last decade has brought recording technologies that allow a recording of EEG activity in mobile participants outside standard laboratory settings. Data-driven analyses approaches were developed that allow for separating brain and non-brain activities. Despite these developments, the standard approach to investigating human cognition requires participants to avoid movement and focuses on analyses at the sensor level. To further our understanding of the brain dynamics that accompany natural cognitive processes that are tight to and make use of our physical structure, we propose to image the brain dynamics during spatial orienting in actively moving participants. Imaging of brain dynamics has to provide information about when specific cortical structures demonstrate systematic changes in activity that can be linked to aspects of cognition and behavior. Electrophysiological data provide the temporal resolution necessary to deliver precise insights into the time course of information processing. The brain dynamics accompanying spatial orienting integrating movement-related idiothetic feedback are unknown. This proposal aims to overcome the existing limitations to brain imaging studies of spatial orienting by using mobile brain/body imaging. This will allow conclusions as to how the brain represents idiothetic information, how this information is used for spatial orienting, and how the brain dynamics of idiothetic information processing contribute to individual differences in spatial tasks.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: USA
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Scott Makeig, Ph.D.