The details of past actions on a smartphone touchscreen are reflected by intrinsic sensorimotor dynamics.

Abstract

Unconstrained day-to-day activities are difficult to quantify and how the corresponding movements shape the brain remain unclear. Here, we recorded all touchscreen smartphone interactions at a sub-second precision and show that the unconstrained day-to-day behavior captured on the phone reflects in the simple sensorimotor computations measured in the laboratory. The behavioral diversity on the phone, the speed of interactions, the amount of social & non-social interactions, all uniquely influenced the trial-to-trial motor variability used to measure the amount of intrinsic neuronal noise. Surprisingly, both the motor performance and the early somatosensory cortical signals (assessed using EEG in passive conditions) became noisier with increased social interactions. Inter-individual differences in how people use the smartphone can help thus decompose the structure of low-level sensorimotor computations.