EEG in Motion - Analyzing brain activity during self- and object motion

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Benedikt Ehinger
• Subject Area: Image and Language Processing, Computer Graphics and Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous and Wearable Computing ; Biological Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 538578433

The measurement of brain potentials using Electroencephalography (EEG) is typically restricted to situations without motion and without movements. That is, experimental stimuli do not move, they are static on the screen, and participants do not move either, even their eye-movements are restricted. Unfortunately, this forces many experiments to be more artificial than desired, impacting a broad range of fields, e.g. cognitive psychology, human-computer-interaction or sports- and movement science. In this Emmy Noether proposal "EEG in motion", I will develop new algorithms and concepts, to allow for motion, to allow for movement in EEG experiments. I focus on three aspects: 1) How to analyze EEG data under smooth pursuit eye-movements, 2) how to measure and analyze retinal optic flow with and without self-motion, and 3) how to build new tools to analyze dynamic content, from movie watching, gaming and even to mobile EEG experiments. The analytical methods developed here relate to the topics of computational statistics, scalability, machine learning, optic flow estimation, eye-tracking, signal-processing or mobile EEG. At the end of these six years, we will have greatly enlarged the application domain of EEG experiment. We will have new insights in how humans move, how we process motion - but we will also provide a new way to perform EEG experiments, this time with natural motion.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups