Linking functions for mind, brain and behavior

To better understand human behavior, the emerging field of model-based cognitive neuroscience seeks to anchor psychological theory to the biological substrate from which behavior originates: the brain. Despite complex dynamics, many researchers in this field have demonstrated that fluctuations in brain activity can be related to fluctuations in components of cognitive models, which instantiate psychological theories. In this talk, I will describe a statistical framework (joint modeling) that links computational models of behavior to neuroimaging data by exploiting patterns of covariation between the streams of data. I will then describe a number of recent advancements that address issues pertaining to scalability, determining significance of brain-behavior connections, and continuous spatio-temporal dynamics