PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Pragathi Priyadharsini Balasubramani
AU  - Alejandro Ojeda
AU  - Vojislav Maric
AU  - Hortense Le
AU  - Gillian Grennan
AU  - Fahad Alim
AU  - Mariam Zafar-Khan
AU  - Juan Diaz-Delgado
AU  - Sarita Silveira
AU  - Dhakshin Ramanathan
AU  - Jyoti Mishra
TI  - Mapping Cognitive Brain Functions at Scale
AID  - 10.1101/2020.05.14.097014
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.05.14.097014
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/05/16/2020.05.14.097014.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/05/16/2020.05.14.097014.full
AB  - A fundamental set of cognitive abilities enable humans to efficiently process goal-relevant information, suppress irrelevant distractions, maintain information in working memory, and act flexibly in different behavioral contexts. Yet, studies of human cognition and their underlying neural mechanisms usually evaluate these cognitive constructs in silos, instead of comprehensively in-tandem within the same individual. Here, we developed a scalable, mobile platform that we refer to “BrainE” (short for Brain Engagement), to rapidly assay several essential aspects of cognition simultaneous with wireless electroencephalography (EEG) recordings. Using BrainE, we rapidly assessed five aspects of cognition including (1) selective attention, (2) response inhibition, (3) working memory, (4) flanker interference and (5) emotion interference processing, in 102 healthy young adults. We evaluated stimulus encoding in all tasks using the EEG neural recordings, and isolated the cortical sources of the spectrotemporal EEG dynamics. Additionally, we used BrainE in a two-visit study in a subset of 25 young adults to investigate the reliability of the neuro-cognitive data as well as its plasticity to transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). We found that stimulus encoding on multiple cognitive tasks could be rapidly assessed, identifying common as well as distinct task processes in both sensory and cognitive control brain regions. Event related synchronization (ERS) in the theta (3-7 Hz) and alpha (8-12 Hz) frequencies as well as event related desynchronization (ERD) in the beta frequencies (13-30 Hz) were distinctly observed in each task. The observed ERS/ERD effects were overall anticorrelated. The two-visit study confirmed high test-retest reliability for both cognitive and neural data, and neural responses showed specific TMS protocol driven modulation. This first study with the BrainE platform showcases its utility in studying neuro-cognitive dynamics in a rapid and scalable fashion.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.