The study of the human brain pursues the understanding of how neural structure and function translate into cognition and behaviour. This general goal has two complementary directions. The first is to uncover fundamental principles that generalise across an entire population. The second is to describe the neural underpinnings of specific individual differences; that is, instead of generalising, the aim is to investigate the particularities of specific individuals. Focusing on the study of stimulus processing, this project bridges between these two approaches by developing novel statistical techniques aimed at dissecting the different parallel aspects of this processing —which is based on general principles— and characterising how such aspects are unique to each individual. This endeavour is important because, bringing closer together goals of basic and applied science, it will contribute methods that can, for example, help to provide better and more individualised treatments and more accurate diagnoses/prognoses by being better at dissecting the heterogeneity of both the causes and the symptoms.
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Conclusions for the final period: we have produced tools to address methodological challenges in the fields of neuroscience and clinical research, including software and tools that we expect to be adopted by other researchers. While the goal of developing tools for finding differences between subjects is been successful, we are still making progress on the statistical disambiguation of concurrent processes from functional data.
