Some of the lab's resarch exploits scalp recordings of EEG signals to study the operations and neural circuits that support visual cognition. For some of our work, signals recorded from subjects' brains are converted into event related potentials (ERPs), which are synched to particular events or actions in experimental tasks.
The picture below shows a subject in one of our EEG experiments. The blueish reflection in his eyes/glasses came from the computer display on which stimuli were presented.
The Vision Lab's
EEG/ERP research uses a 128-channel high spatial density, high-impedance EEG system from Electric Geodesics, Inc. Our EEG/ERP analyses are carried out either with homebrew, Matlab-based
software or BESA (Brain Electrical Source Analysis).
In addition to the Volen Center's EEG/ERP facility, members of our lab occasionally collect data using the 256 channel, high-impedance EEG rig at the Vision and Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, McMaster University, Hamilton ON.
As with all areas of science, successful ERP research results on a large set of principles of good practice. Steven Luck (University of Iowa) cast these principles into simple, clear form in his chapter in Todd Handy's valuable Event-Related Potentials : A Methods Handbook, MIT Press, 2005. For an even briefer, but perhaps mildly offensive version of these rules, click here.