NEUR 4850 Advanced Techniques in Cognitive Neuroscience

Course Structure Intentionally loose structure – we’ll create this course as we go along and explore different approaches to EEG You will function as if you are students in my lab

Course Structure Grading 30% class participation 30% midterm exam 40% project

Rough Timeline BESA Dipole Simulator to create hypothetical “forward solution” for Visual Evoked Potentials Collect and Analyze real Visual Evoked potentials Design your own experiment Write a “grant proposal” to pitch it to the class Class picks two experiments and runs these in small groups Learn by doingLearn by watching and listening

Course Structure The Project: Design and carry out a simple “demonstration” (not experiment) Using SIMPLE gadgets and gizmos that you find around the lab A button box to record participant’s input A Simple computer program that blinks boxes on the screen Paper, Pencil, etc. Random stuff…

Electroencephalography and the Event-Related Potential 1929 – first measurement of brain electrical activity from scalp electrodes (Berger, 1929) Believed to be artifactual and/or of no significance Currently PubMed search for “EEG” in keywords returns 107,088 hits That’s about 3 ½ papers per day

Electroencephalography and the Event-Related Potential Time Voltage -Place an electrode on the scalp and another one somewhere else (non- cephalic ground) -Amplify the signal to record the voltage difference across these electrodes -Keep a running measurement of how that voltage changes over time -This is the EEG

From EEG to ERP The EEG is characterized by ongoing “oscillations” that (presumably) reflect aspects of the underlying neural activity

From EEG to ERP The EEG is characterized by ongoing “oscillations” that (presumably) reflect aspects of the underlying neural activity Discrete events such as stimuli don’t usually “show up” in the EEG wave Substantial signal processing is necessary to reveal the “signal” from the “noise” Much of the “post-processing” of scalp recorded EEG is directly related to handling intra-cranial EEG

CCBN Dense-Array EEG Netstation – records EEG and event triggers Digamize –records electrode locations BESA -post-processing -ERP averaging -voltage maps -source imaging MatLab Fieldtrip BrainVoyager SPSS -EEG spectral analysis - MRI coregistration MANUSCRIPT Stimuli Event Triggers Raw EEG.raw.sfp Data Files