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As the field of computational cognitive neuroscience continues to expand and generate new theories, there is a growing need for more advanced methods to test the hypothesis of brain-behavior relationships. Recent progress in Bayesian cognitive modeling has enabled the combination of neural and behavioral models into a single unifying framework. However, these approaches require manual feature extraction, and lack the capability to discover previously unknown neural features in more complex data. Consequently, this would hinder the expressiveness of the models. To address these challenges, we propose a Neurocognitive Variational Autoencoder (NCVA) to conjoin high-dimensional EEG with a cognitive model in both generative and predictive modeling analyses. Importantly, our NCVA enables both the prediction of EEG signals given behavioral data and the estimation of cognitive model parameters from EEG signals. This novel approach can allow for a more comprehensive understanding of the triplet relationship between behavior, brain activity, and cognitive processes. 

Abstract We present motivation and practical steps necessary to find parameter estimates of joint models of behavior and neural electrophysiological data. This tutorial is written for researchers wishing to build joint models of human behavior and scalp and intracranial electroencephalographic (EEG) or magnetoencephalographic (MEG) data, and more specifically those researchers who seek to understand human cognition. Although these techniques could easily be applied to animal models, the focus of this tutorial is on human participants. Joint modeling of M/EEG and behavior requires some knowledge of existing computational and cognitive theories, M/EEG artifact correction, M/EEG analysis techniques, cognitive modeling, and programming for statistical modeling implementation. This paper seeks to give an introduction to these techniques as they apply to estimating parameters from neurocognitive models of M/EEG and human behavior, and to evaluate model results and compare models. Due to our research and knowledge on the subject matter, our examples in this paper will focus on testing specific hypotheses in human decision-making theory. However, most of the motivation and discussion of this paper applies across many modeling procedures and applications. We provide Python (and linked R) code examples in the tutorial and appendix. Readers are encouraged to try the exercises at the end of the document.