The Walking Brain: Mapping feature-specific cortical responses to naturally unfolding sensory experience in the real world
Abstract
Understanding how the brain processes the everyday world is fundamental, yet laboratory paradigms exclude self-generated movement, unscripted events, and a continuously evolving multisensory environment. Wearable neuroimaging enables real-world measurement, but linking neural activity to uncontrolled sensory information remains challenging. Here, we extend a feature-based framework from naturalistic movie viewing to everyday behavior using wearable whole-head high-density fNIRS and participant-specific audiovisual recordings during movies and outdoor walking with no explicit task or scripted audiovisual sequence. Luminance- and sound-related cortical maps showed significant spatial correspondence, particularly in visual and auditory regions, whereas face-related correspondence was weaker. Luminance- and face-related maps were reproducible within individuals across repeated walks. Additional exploratory analysis demonstrated, to our knowledge, the first out-of-sample encoding of continuous environmental features during unconstrained real-world fNIRS, predicting cortical activity during held-out walking periods. Together, these findings establish a feature-based framework for linking cortical activity to naturally unfolding sensory experience in everyday behavior.
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BibTeX
@misc{altınkaynak2026walking,
title = {{The Walking Brain: Mapping feature-specific cortical responses to naturally unfolding sensory experience in the real world}},
author = {M. Altınkaynak and L. B. Carlton and E. Topkoc and D. A. Boas and M. A. Yücel},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.64898/2026.09.29.754498},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.29.754498v1},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - The Walking Brain: Mapping feature-specific cortical responses to naturally unfolding sensory experience in the real world
AU - M. Altınkaynak
AU - L. B. Carlton
AU - E. Topkoc
AU - D. A. Boas
AU - M. A. Yücel
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/29
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.09.29.754498
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.29.754498v1
AB - Understanding how the brain processes the everyday world is fundamental, yet laboratory paradigms exclude self-generated movement, unscripted events, and a continuously evolving multisensory environment. Wearable neuroimaging enables real-world measurement, but linking neural activity to uncontrolled sensory information remains challenging. Here, we extend a feature-based framework from naturalistic movie viewing to everyday behavior using wearable whole-head high-density fNIRS and participant-specific audiovisual recordings during movies and outdoor walking with no explicit task or scripted audiovisual sequence. Luminance- and sound-related cortical maps showed significant spatial correspondence, particularly in visual and auditory regions, whereas face-related correspondence was weaker. Luminance- and face-related maps were reproducible within individuals across repeated walks. Additional exploratory analysis demonstrated, to our knowledge, the first out-of-sample encoding of continuous environmental features during unconstrained real-world fNIRS, predicting cortical activity during held-out walking periods. Together, these findings establish a feature-based framework for linking cortical activity to naturally unfolding sensory experience in everyday behavior.
ER -