Bridging the gap between brain activity and cognition: Beyond the different tales of fMRI data analysis

Abstract

The human brain is an extremely complex system of interacting physical and functional units, ranging from single neurons to complex networks. Cognition is a network phenomenon because it does not exist in isolated synapses, neurons, or even brain areas. In spite of that, a great amount of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have explored what areas are involved in a variety of cognitive processes, merely localizing where in the brain those processes occur. Instead, the very notion of network phenomena requires understanding spatiotemporal dynamics, which, in turn, depends on the way fMRI data are analyzed. What are the mechanisms for simulating different cognitive functions and their spatiotemporal activity patterns? In order to bridge the gap between brain network activity and the emerging cognitive functions, we need more plausible computational models, which should reflect putative neural mechanisms and the properties of brain network dynamics.