CSHC - Center for the Study of Human Cognition

CogLab is a facility for the collection of behavioural data. It consists of seven laboratory cells setup for a wide range of cognitive experiment, running e.g. with E-Primeot the PsycToolbox. One cell has a tachistoscope with a precision of 1 ms exposure, allowing for well controlled studies of visual stimuli like subliminal priming. This room is also shielded against radiowaves to allow for a controlled psychophysiology environment with equipment to record EMG, ESR, and EEG. One cell is set up with an IView eyetracker for studies involving eye gaze, eye movements and pupillary responses.

Event-related potentials (ERPs) are changes in electrical currents in response to stimuli and cognitive tasks. With ERPs brain activity can be measured at a very high temporal scale, e.g. by recoding eectric potentials thousand times a second. In contrast to measures of blood oxygenation with fMRI, ERPs are assumed to be direct reflections of neural activity, and are thus a powerful tool in the study of human cognition. The three parameters of ERP are the strength of the response (amplitude), the speed of the response (latency), and the localization of the response (scalp topography).

The functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging lab provides infrastructure for functional neuroimaging experiments in the area of cognitive neuroscience. Buildings blocks of the Lab are good availability of scan-time on a 3T MRI set up for fMRI, access to analysis computers in the department of psychology and on the TITAN grid, and regular fMRI methods meetings.

We have a laboratory dedicated to analysis of neuroimaging data. At the moment, the lab consists of 10 workstations and 30 processing units, most of which runs Linux (Fedora Core 4). With the exception of use of NeuroScan software for some ERP-preprocessing and a minor part of the workstations running windows, the programs used are freely available and mostly open-source.