Dense sampling approaches for psychiatry research: Adventures with scanners and smartphones

A key challenge for understanding human experience is to capture the interplay between biology, environment, and culture. Because these levels of analysis operate across temporal scales from milliseconds to years, multimodal techniques are needed to provide insight into their operation and interaction. Data from brain scanning (e.g., neuroimaging) and smartphones are increasingly combined to provide complementary insights into the neurobiological correlates of dynamic psychiatric phenotypes as they unfold in real-world settings. We review literature published in the last three years highlighting how scanners and smartphones can be combined to push forward our understanding of brain-behavior relationships in health and disease.