Matt Smith (Pitt) and Byron Yu (CMU) have recently been award a four year, $1 million National Science Foundation grant to study perception and cognition using brain computer interfaces.
“When a person views an image many times, they may interpret it very differently depending on their recent experience, attention, and frame of mind,” Smith notes. “This highlights that our perception of the world occurs through a combination of both the sensory environment and our cognitive state. Our project attempts to understand how these two aspects are combined, which is of critical importance for perception and behavior. We apply advanced statistical approaches to brain activity in large groups of neurons in real time, enabling us to estimate the brain’s sensory and cognitive state from moment to moment, and give the subject feedback immediately. This “closed loop” is an ideal configuration to address basic scientific questions and optimize training to guide behavior.”
Read more about the work here…