Grant: Research Tools and Instruments

This proposal is to replace and upgrade the human electroencephalography (EEG) facility within the Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience at the University of Lethbridge.  Our group uses EEG to study how electrical activity in the brain responds when we see and hear. When visual or auditory sensory events happen in the world around us, our brains respond by processing those inputs in primary sensory regions and passing along "bottom-up" information to other brain regions. However, the brain also makes predictions about how those sensory inputs should change over time, and it sends those "top-down" predictions to primary areas to help when the visual or auditory input is very complex or distorted. It is important that we figure out how those "bottom-up" and "top-down" streams of information interact in the brain, because it is a fundamental process underlying all of cognition and will help explain why perception changes as humans grow and age, and why cognitive disorders happen. Understanding how the human brain matches up top-down predictions with bottom-up evidence will even help us understand similarities and differences between biological brains and artificial neural networks that are at the heart of Artificial Intelligence. We use virtual-reality and immersive displays to present realistic sensory scenes to research participants while measuring their brain electrical activity with EEG. The requested EEG system will replace a 12 year old system that has reached its end-of-life and is no longer supported by the manufacturer. The requested system includes higher resolution sensors and also state-of-the-art "mobile" sensors that will let us do EEG research in many different real-world settings. The University of Lethbridge recently added a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) facility which allows us to take very high-resolution images of the human brain. The requested EEG system will enable us to merge EEG and MRI data to leverage the complementary strengths of each instrument. This will allow us to find out specifically which brain regions are involved in perception and cognition, and how those regions communicate with each other.