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The Research, Innovation and Dissemination Center for Neuromathematics (RIDC NeuroMat) is a center of mathematics whose mission is to develop the new mathematics needed to construct a Theory of the Brain accounting for the experimental data gathered by neuroscience research.
Mathematician Antonio Galves coordinates the center.
Hosted by the University of São Paulo, the RIDC NeuroMat was established in 2013, with support from the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), grant 2013/07699-0.
The RIDC NeuroMat has an interdisciplinary team, bringing together researchers in mathematics, computer science, statistics, neuroscience, biology, physics and communication, among other disciplines.
RIDC NeuroMat leads a worldwide university network, with ramifications that sprawl to several high-level research institutions in Brazil, Latin America, the United States and Europe. Most research output has had co-authors from more than one country, thus contributing to put NeuroMat at the center of a blossoming international scientific cooperation around Neuromathematics.
The Goalkeeper Game is a computer game being developed by the NeuroMat team since June 2015, associated to the experimental protocol being developed with plasticity in brachial plexus avulsion. In this game, brain signatures are evaluated through the performance of the participant in guessing the next direction chosen by the penalty-taker. The system records the sequence of guesses of the player, who must identify the context tree model used by a virtual penalty-taker.
In this way, the game allows for cheap and large-scale reaction time and error rate data collection, offering an alternative and complementary means to infer about brain functioning.
The NeuroMat "Goalkeeper Game" is at the same time a computer game and an ambitious transdisciplinary research project. In the three-level computer game, an individual takes up the role of a goalkeeper that faces a penalty taker who is ready to shoot. As the game evolves, the expectation is that the individual will be able to make sense of the strategy of the penalty taker and have a high rate of success in thwarting scores. Marco Gubitoso, NeuroMat researcher (coordinator of of the Goalkeeper Game project) and professor at USP Institute of Mathematics and Statistics, explains that the game is a result of the "statistical brain" hypothesis, ie the brain acts as a statistical machine learning to recognize patterns. The Goalkeeper Game collects some of the player data mistakes and then try to make some predictions. In addition, the game serves as an additional tool for diagnosing deficiencies related to attention and concentration.
"The main problem is to obtain relevant information on the functional brain in a voluntary and noninvasive way in order to test and validate models of brain functioning," said Gubitoso.