Leveraging new technologies to study the brain and movement behaviour of humans during dynamic decision making

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The objective of this research program is to measure how people's brains, bodies and surroundings change when they make real-life movement decisions. I will use new technologies to explore decisions made in a range of environments, from traditional laboratory settings, through Virtual Reality (VR) to the real world. At the heart of this proposal is the fact that decision making is dynamic: First, because the brain is dynamic with activity that always changes; Second, because people are dynamic as they move through the world; and Third because the world is dynamic, with objects that change position. Despite this, most previous work has looked at decisions made by stationary people between choice options that don't move. Across six projects, I will test a combination of people who are either stationary or moving while they interact with either stationary or moving environments. In doing so, I will fulfill three short term objectives: First, to understand the dynamics of the brain, we will measure brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG). Our objective will be to isolate specific patterns of activity that occur when someone is making a decision. Second, to make the transition out of the lab to study movement decision making in the real world, we will explore new ways of recording motion. We will test whether movements made on smart-devices like phones and tablets can provide useful movement information, and will also test whether advances in machine learning can provide detailed movement data from regular video recordings. Finally, third, we will explore the convergence of moving people and moving environments by studying object interactions, where people's movements result in changes to their surroundings. Again, to meet our goal of moving from the lab to the real world we will investigate these behaviours in Virtual Reality and from fully mobile participants where we simultaneously record synchronized eye, motion and EEG data. The long-term impact of this work will be most evident in how it is applied. Consider not being able to move your arm to properly brush your teeth or feed yourself, and having to go to therapy for treatment. Now imagine that by the time you arrive in the treatment room, sit at the table and perform a series of simple movements, your clinician can consult an automatically generated report detailing your movement impairments to help guide your rehabilitation. This is just one future enabled by the proposed research program. By expanding our ability and versatility to capture and analyze high quality data about how people, look, think and move we can envision many previously unimaginable futures - from how we diagnose concussions on the sidelines of a sports game to how we monitor astronaut's health in space. At the core of these applied initiatives is the basic science objective of this application - to understand human behaviour you must precisely quantify how brains, bodies and environments change with time.