RUI: Establishment of a high-density event-related potential laboratory at an undergraduate college for the study of cognitive neuroscience

Pomona College, Claremont CA

Investigators

Abstract

This grant supports the establishment of a 128-channel event-related potential (ERP) laboratory at an undergraduate institution, Pomona College, in order to investigate the spatial and temporal dimensions of brain activity associated with cognition. In doing so, this project meets the criteria for the NSF Cognitive Neuroscience initiative. Three projects will be conducted during the grant period. The first is an exploration of how spatial and temporal patterns of brain activity during the initial encoding of information are related to subsequent source memory judgments. Specifically, we will investigate the relationship between encoding event-related potentials during and subsequent source memory judgments, including temporal order, spatial location, and recollection versus familiarity judgments. The second line of research will investigate the extent to which stable individual differences in psychological and biological measures of stress are predictive of memory functioning and concomitant ERP activity. We are specifically interested in assessing whether individuals with high chronic stress will have impaired memory functioning and whether this will be evidenced in a decreased old/new amplitude difference for the explicit but not implicit memory conditions. The third line of research will expose a diverse group of students to the use of electrophysiological imaging methods to explore issues from the classic psychological literature. We are designing a student research project to investigate an issue of particular interest to underrepresented students. Specifically, we will use high-density ERP recordings to investigate how brain activity may be associated with cognitive processing of information related to the individualism-collectivism dimension of culture. The proposed research will serve as a model for how psychological issues can be explored using high-density ERP recordings. We anticipate that the knowledge gained from applying this technique to psychological problems will encourage the use of ERP techniques among other psychology and neuroscience faculty in the future.