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In contrast to the OBB framework, the BSA framework additionally highlights the importance that the brain will actively adapt to the environment so that even though the functional apparatus is impaired (e.g. losing teeth), individuals can maintain feeding behaviour. A critical step to test this general hypothesis is to focus on the individuals who show structural deficits (e.g. with a higher number of missing teeth) but maintain a good oral function. In this group, the degree of sensorimotor adaptation and learning is assessed using specific tasks (see Chapter 8). The association between task performance and brain activation, particularly in the regions associated with cognitive, affective and motivational processing, is assessed using neuroimaging. Notably, the superiority of neuroimaging is that it can assess brain activation associated with complicated processing of learning and adaptation in human subjects – which may be challenging to perform on animal subjects.