Society for Neuroscience Washington, D.C.
Nov. 12-16, 2005
Ruey-Song Huang, Tzyy-Ping Jung, Jeng-Ren Duann, Scott Makeig & Martin I. Sereno , Department of Cognitive Science and Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience, Institute for Neural Computation University of California San Diego, La Jolla CA, USA
Imaging brain dynamics during continuous driving using independent component analysis
The neural dynamics of driving was investigated with electroencephalogram (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). A virtual-reality scene was constructed to simulate driving on the left lane on a straight highway at night. Every 4 to 8 seconds, the car pulled away towards the curb or into the opposite lane. Subjects were required to steer the car back to the left lane using two arrow keys under their right fingers. Five subjects participated in a one-hour experiment where 256-channel EEG/EOG/EKG signals and driving performance were recorded at 256 Hz. Driving performance was measured by deviation from the center of the left lane and reaction time. Independent components and dipole source locations were obtained using EEGLAB toolbox (sccn.ucsd.edu/eeglab). Subjects also participated in a separate fMRI experiment on a different day. The driving scene was projected onto a plastic screen inside the scanner in a direct-view setup. In the scanner, subjects steered the car using a two-key response box. Functional data were acquired with an 8-channel phased-array head coil in a GE 3T scanner using a standard EPI sequence (TR=2 s, TE=30 ms, 64x64 voxels, 31 slices, 3.125x3.125x4 mm, 256 or 512 images). Data were analyzed using FMRLAB (sccn.ucsd.edu/fmrlab) and maps of independent fMRI components were rendered on inflated cortical surfaces using FreeSurfer. BOLD activities of several spatially independent brain processes correlated strongly with driving performance (visual motion, posterior parietal, somatomotor, parietal-prefrontal, dorsal lateral prefrontal, medial prefrontal and anterior cingulate networks). Roughly corresponding temporally independent EEG components showed increased/decreased phasic 10 and/or 20 Hz activities when subjects steered back into the left lane. This study demonstrates that neural dynamics during continuous driving can be studied with different spatio-temporal resolutions using independent component analysis.