MRI: Acquisition of Instrumentation to Measure the Time-Course and Distribution of Cortical Activity in Perceptual Cognitive, and Social Psychological Processing

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This grant supports the acquisition of instrumentation to measure Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) in cognitive and social neuroscience research. ERPs reflect the synaptic activity of the brain that occur during mental activity. The requested instrumentation will be used with fMRI brain scanning at the Brain Research Imaging Center (BRIC) at the University of Chicago. BRIC has purchased a 3T scanner to study psychological processes such as spoken language understanding, shifts of attention, perceptuo-motor planning and motor imagery, and social categorization. Although behavioral studies have told us much about these mental processes, these studies cannot indicate the specific way in which the brain implements this processing. fMRI can identify which parts of the brain are involved in processing. Although fMRI can localize cortical areas, blood-flow responses are too slow to measure the timing of activity in these areas. ERPs provide this timing information, but cannot localize brain activity as finely as fMRI. fMRI together with ERP combines high spatial resolution and temporal resolution to investigate the functional processing in the brain. Measuring ERP activity during fMRI will aid in relating temporal and spatial information about cortical processing. Three broad projects will initially use the instrumentation. One project will investigate interactions between language-specific mechanisms and more general cognitive processes during language comprehension. This research examines how understanding uses attention and memory as well as paralinguistic information. ERP measures will investigate relative timing of cortical activity in working memory and attention compared with specifically linguistic processing. The second project will examine neural mechanisms involved in perception and production of action. Comparison of perceptual processing of symbolic cues for actions with direct human movement cues (to trigger "mirror" cells) will investigate neural mechanisms underlying conceptual operations in motor movements and motor "imagery" circuits. The third project investigates affective evaluation and social categorization addressing the theory that positive and negative attitudes are mediated by different mechanisms. fMRI and ERP will identify relevant brain areas and examine the time-course of processing in affective, perceptual, and autonomic parts of these networks to investigate how affective evaluation systems mediate stereotypic responses in social categorization.