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

The goal of the present proposal is to acquire the equipment and software to set-up the first adult human electrophysiological laboratory at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, in order to conduct forefront research in cognitive sciences and neuropsychology. The work that will be conducted within the laboratory will take advantage of powerful electrophysiological techniques recently developed to study multitasking interference in order to disentangle effects of spatial shifts, modality switching, task switching, distractor interference and central bottleneck processing in dual-task performance, and to characterize their relationships. Neutral and emotional face processing under dual-task demands will also be investigated, as well as semantic and syntactic processing and error processing. Understanding multitasking processing limitations in healthy young adults opens a fascinating window into the functional architecture of the human brain, and it enables us to discover which processes are automatic and which processes are controlled. In addition to its fundamental theoretical value, this research will also have important practical implications. For example, it will help conceive safer and more efficient human-machine interfaces, and technologies that will be better adapted to demanding working environments (i.e., emergency rooms, airport control towers, etc.). This basic research could also be translated eventually to applied research, in order to characterize abnormal cognitive processing in several clinical populations.