Virtual Demonstrations

As the CaN CTA program has come to a close, we intended to develop a grand event that could display the breadth, depth, and highly innovative outcomes from the decade of effort within our team. Of course, with the global pandemic of 2020, our vision for such an event could not be manifested as conceived.  While not equal in any way to a full-scale in-person event, a few of our teams have developed demonstration content that could be experienced virtually, as with our Virtual Poster Session.

Please use the linked items below to get an up-close view of any technology that that you would like to see in action.

As previously presented in greater detail, the Advanced Computational Approaches Demonstration was a main technical area within the CaN CTA.  Largely producing things that are not always so amenable to demonstration, such as advanced, automated processing pipelines, computational algorithms for identification of sources of brain activity, a new database tagging format (HED), and many others, the ACA thrust has produced an impressive array of tools and methods for use by the cognitive neuroscience community at large.  Here, we demonstrate the power of combining peripheral and central physiological signals to enable inferences of changes in cognitive state during performance.

Real World Neuroimaging Demonstration, previously presented in greater detail. A major goal of the research within DEVCOM ARL is to identify and develop methods that enable robust translation of laboratory-based basic science into real-world operational considerations.  Of specific concerns are exactly those factors that are controlled in typical laboratory settings. These include things like electromagnetic interference, signal artifacts due to physical movement of the person wearing the sensors, sweat that can detriment the contacts between sensors and skin, and so forth.  Here, you will see a brief video that demonstrates some of the methods that were developed and employed within the CaN CTA to facilitate high-quality measurement and data acquisition in complex, real-world environments.

Brain Computer Interaction Demonstration. Here, visitors may explore a first-person view of the screen feedback that is provided when participating in this novel experimental task. Persons wearing physiological monitoring devices (such as EEG, ECG) fly a virtual plane using an immersive head-mounted display and simple joystick.  Based on estimated levels of arousal from the physiological data, sound feedback is provided that acts to drive the arousal state back to optimum when it has drifted either high or low.  Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), this demonstration highlights the high potential value of integrating human behavioral and physiological monitoring into the real-time control mechanisms for complex operational tasks.

Tactical Awareness via Collective Knowledge (TACK) consists of human state identification models that exploit gaze and physiological data to provide real-time estimates of human situation awareness across heterogeneous teams and improve target search in complex, unstructured environments.  It was developed to leverage the Advanced Computational Approaches, Real-World Neuroscience, and Brain-Computer Interaction techniques to enable the quantification, prediction, and enhanced squad-level shared situational awareness and understanding within austere, complex, and uncertain environments. Here, you will see a brief video that explains this truly transformative application of the ground breaking foundational science from the CaN CTA.