Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have attracted much attention recently, triggered by new scientific progress in understanding brain function and by impressive applications. The aim of this review is to give an overview of the various steps in the BCI cycle, i.e., the loop from the measurement of brain activity, classification of data, feedback to the subject and the effect of feedback on brain activity. In this article we will review the critical steps of the BCI cycle, the present issues and state-of-the-art results. Moreover, we will develop a vision on how recently obtained results may contribute to new insights in neurocognition and, in particular, in the neural representation of perceived stimuli, intended actions and emotions. Now is the right time to explore what can be gained by embracing real-time, online BCI and by adding it to the set of experimental tools already available to the cognitive neuroscientist. We close by pointing out some unresolved issues and present our view on how BCI could become an important new tool for probing human cognition.

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A well-established task in forensic writer identification focuses on the comparison of prototypical character shapes (allographs) present in handwriting. In order for a computer to perform this task convincingly, it should yield results that are plausible and understandable to the human expert. Trajectory matching is a well-known method to compare two allographs. This paper assesses a promising technique for so-called humancongruous trajectory matching, called Dynamic Time Warping (DTW). In the first part of the paper, an experiment is described that shows that DTW yields results that correspond to the expectations of human users. Since DTW requires the dynamics of the handwritten trace, the "online" dynamic allograph trajectories need to be extracted from the "offline" scanned documents. In the second part of the paper, an automatic procedure to perform this task is described. Images were generated from a large online dataset that provides the true trajectories. This allows for a quantitative assessment of the trajectory extraction techniques rather than a qualitative discussion of a small number of examples. Our results show that DTW can significantly improve the results from trajectory extraction when compared to traditional techniques.