A group of Professor Nobu Ishii of the Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, in collaboration with the Institute for International Telecommunications Basic Technology, reads the prediction of the next scene from the brain activity when working on a maze game. I succeeded in doing so.
It is expected that this epoch-making discovery, which confirmed that brain activity can be read by magnetic resonance imaging, will contribute to the elucidation of the mechanism in the brain and lead to the development of new communication tools using brain activity.The research results were published in the British scientific journal "Scientific Reports" (electronic version).
According to Kyoto University, we asked experimental participants to play a game involving spatial movement in a nuclear magnetic resonance imaging device and measured brain activity.As a result, it was found that the medial frontal lobe in front of the brain and the superior parietal lobule at the top of the head predict the next scene to be seen.
In these areas, when the experiment participants were wrongly predicted, they showed patterns of brain activity that corresponded to the wrong scene, rather than the correct scene that matched the maze structure.This shows that we were able to read subjective assumptions that were not objective facts.
Furthermore, by arranging the predictions read from the brain activity on the maze, the map remembered by the experiment participants was restored.More than 3% of the restored maps had the same structure in all three types of maps used in the experiment.The higher the correct answer rate of the scene prediction, the closer to the actual map the experiment participants read, so we came to the conclusion that the skill of the scene prediction can be explained by the difference in the activity pattern of the brain.
When humans try to move to their destination, prediction plays an important role in action decisions, such as predicting the next scene to appear.Previous studies have shown that the direction in which humans are moving is represented by hippocampal activity, but little is known about the predictions of the next scene, which has not yet been seen.
Therefore, Professor Ishii's group assumes that the region of the brain responsible for prediction shows different activity patterns depending on the scene to be predicted, and targets the brain region that has been considered to be important for spatial cognition, and the activity pattern depending on the prediction scene. I investigated if there was a difference.
Professor Ishii's group said, "In this research, we used a simple maze with only walls and passages. By using a maze with a more complicated structure, it will be a stepping stone for technology to read various information from brain activity." I'm looking forward to it.
