Diego Vidaurre Henche
Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, Aarhus University.

Characterising individual differences using models of brain dynamics?

Abstract: All models of the brain are wrong to a large extent, but sometimes some of them can be useful. In cognitive science, neuroscience, psychiatry, etc. we use models to help us understand complex systems and for prediction and forecasting. In this talk I will focus on prediction, which is used for example for diagnosis and prognosis; but also as a tool for understanding (which I will discuss). Brain activity during wakeful rest, in particular, has been shown to be significantly predictive of various subject psychological and/or clinical traits. But it is far from obvious how to construct features that take into account the dynamics of brain activity given that, in an unconstrained cognition paradigm, we cannot align the subjects' data temporally. In this talk, I will describe some methods and algorithms to predict behavioural traits from brain activity via intermediate models of brain activity, using data from fMRI and EEG.