NSF Award
1625521
The main goal of this cognitive neuroscience project is to develop, implement, and disseminate best practices in cognitive electrophysiology education for undergraduates with the aim of increasing the quality and number of education and training opportunities for undergraduates, and increasing research outcomes that involve undergraduate co-authors. The three specific goals are: (1) Develop open-access curricula for cognitive electrophysiology that employ evidence-based practices. (2) Create an open-access database of results from 6 classic event-related potential (ERP) experiments that have been optimized in terms of best practices in experimental design and produce highly reliable results. These data will form the basis of class activities, lab training, and independent research and will include a variety of individual difference measures that can also be used for student-generated hypothesis testing. (3) Engage in ongoing improvement of the learning materials through active engagement with a 9-member faculty learning community of users and students active in this field. This nascent community will be expanded by hosting a series of yearly meetings at a major conference that will be open to all interested faculty and students and by including undergraduate research assistants in the curriculum design and research activities.<br/><br/>This project would address the need for curricular materials in a burgeoning field of research that combines a number of STEM disciplines (biology, chemistry, physics, psychology, and electrical engineering) in a focus on cognitive neuroscience. One cognitive neuroscience measurement technique that is particularly conducive to undergraduate learning is cognitive electrophysiology (electroencephalography/ event-related potentials; EEG/ERP). EEG/ERP studies examine changes in scalp-recorded brain electrical activity corresponding to cognitive processing in real time. EEG refers to the dynamic, ongoing electrical activity recorded during cognitive processing. ERP refers to the most commonly used method of electrophysiological research, relying on signal averaging to extract the activity reliably linked with specific sensory stimuli and/or motor responses (the electrical potentials that are related to specific events). Cognitive electrophysiology is well suited for undergraduate research because the equipment and supplies are relatively inexpensive and the opportunities for learning are high.
