RC1 – Mobile Brain/Body Imaging – the human brain in its natural habitat

Lecturer: Marius Klug
Fields: Cognitive Neuroscience

Content

Recent technological advancements in instrumentation and analysis methods of human brain imaging data such as electroencephalography (EEG) increasingly allow the measurement of mobile participants interacting with their environment. The new field of Mobile Brain/Body Imaging (MoBI) (Gramann et al., 2011; Jungnickel et al., 2019) combines these measurements with imaging methods regarding the body, such as motion or eye tracking, and analyzes the multimodal data in order to investigate natural cognition in action. These analyses require the synchronized import of all data streams, options to process body data modalities, reliable preprocessing of EEG data in light of the elevated amount of non-cortical contributions in mobile settings, and the combined functional analysis of all modalities.

To facilitate this process, the BeMoBIL Pipeline was created (Klug et al., 2022). This is an open-source MATLAB toolbox for fully synchronized, automatic, transparent, and replicable import, processing, and visualization of MoBI and other EEG data. It includes wrappers for EEGLAB functions, uses various existing EEGLAB plugins, and comes with additional new functionalities such as the extraction of events from the data. All parameters are configurable in central scripts and everything is additionally stored in the data itself, facilitating the report and replication of MoBI studies. Throughout the process, plots are generated to keep the researchers informed.

This course will introduce the concept of MoBI, explain EEG analysis in the BeMoBIL Pipeline with details and parameter choices, and give an outlook on example applications and future prospects.

Literature

  • Gramann, K., Gwin, J. T., Ferris, D. P., Oie, K., Jung, T. P., Lin, C. T., Liao, L. D., & Makeig, S. (2011). Cognition in action: Imaging brain/body dynamics in mobile humans. Reviews in the Neurosciences, 22(6), 593–608.
  • Jungnickel, E., Gehrke, L., Klug, M., & Gramann, K. (2019). MoBI-Mobile Brain/Body Imaging. In H. Ayaz & F. Dehais (Eds.), Neuroergonomics: The Brain at Work and in Everyday Life (1st ed., pp. 59–63). Elsevier.
  • Klug, M., Jeung, S., Wunderlich, A., Gehrke, L., Protzak, J., Djebbara, Z., Argubi-Wollesen, A., Wollesen, B., & Gramann, K. (2022). The BeMoBIL Pipeline for automated analyses of multimodal mobile brain and body imaging data. In bioRxiv.

Lecturer

TU Berlin: FG Biopsychologie und Neuroergonomie, Marius Klug

Marius studied Cognitive Science in Tübingen, Germany, and received his PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at the TU Berin, Germany. His research focused on methodological considerations and advancements of Mobile Brain/Body Imaging data analysis. In his new research group at BTU Cottbus, Germany, he will investigate the application of physiological data as user interfaces in virtual reality.

Affiliation: TU Berlin, BTU Cottbus, Zander Labs
Homepage: https://discord.gg/7MJjQ3f