Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

With the funds requested the applicant, his trainees, and colleagues will have access to a cutting-edge cognitive neuroscience laboratory for exploring how mental representations and mental processes which operate on them are implemented in the brain. There are several methods that can be used fruitfully in this important task. A lesson from contemporary cognitive neuroscience is that no single method will suffice, it is fair to say that methods for functional neuroimaging have become fundamental tools in this endeavor. Of these, high density recording of electrical brain potentials (EEG) offers the cognitive neuroscientist the most cost-effective neuroimaging tool with sufficiently high (millisecond) temporal precision to shed light on how the brain implements mind. The high density sampling, together with source-localization algorithms, will permit estimation of the likely sources of the brain activity. As described in my most recently funded Discovery Grant, we will use this EEG equipment to investigate the networks of attention, that we construe as implementing voluntary and reflexive allocation of mental processing resources with the domains of time, space and task. And, when it is available, we will share this equipment with my local collaborators in 4 Dalhousie faculties (Medicine, Science, Computer Science & Kinesiology).