MRI: Acquisition of a Neurophysiology Laboratory for a Research and Training Initiative in Affective, Social, and Cognitive Neuroscience

在美国国家科学基金会主要研究仪器计划的支持下，约瑟夫·A。Mikels和他的四名合作研究者将购买一个集成的脑电图/事件相关电位（EEG/ERP）采集系统，该系统具有眼动跟踪和生理测量功能。通过这些技术，研究小组将探索成年人一生中几种情感，社会和认知现象的神经和生理基础。这些设备将加强必要的教学，培训和研究基础设施，以更好地为德保罗大学的本科生，研究生和教师服务。这个教学和研究实验室将服务于教师和学生在几个部门的需求，并将代表一个核心计划，将使德保罗成为一个有竞争力的机构在健康和生命科学。 研究团队包括情绪、认知、社会心理学和神经科学领域的活跃研究人员。提出了五个合作研究项目。项目1的重点是如何在整个成年生活的情绪和认知的变化影响决策。PI将测量EEG/ERP以及情绪唤醒的生理指标，以了解决策中年龄相关变化的基础。在不同的信息呈现情境中，老年人会表现出有偏见的和非最佳的选择，例如框架效应和比率偏见现象。项目2将探讨在对生命和生活经验的有限性做出反应时发生的动机转变背后的因果机制。该项目将利用ERP方法来了解死亡率显着性和情绪因素如何影响老年人和年轻人的大脑激活和信息处理。这项工作也将扩展到艺术欣赏领域的相似性评价两个坑理论-社会情绪选择性理论（SST）和恐怖管理理论（TMT）。项目3将使用ERP和眼动追踪方法来研究年龄差异在处理情绪化信息（即，积极性效应）。此外，这个项目将研究这些判断现象之间的关系如何潜在地影响与年龄相关的住房贷款选择的差异。将SST和积极性效应扩展到这个领域，有望揭示如何更好地保护老年人免受欺诈。项目4探讨了工作记忆容量如何影响阅读过程中各种推理生成的大脑定位。此外，研究人员还将考察年轻人和老年人在阅读叙述性文本时推理发生的时间过程。项目5将使用ERP方法更好地阐明词汇处理的精确时间过程，超越传统的反应时间（RT）测量方法。有趣的是，老年人在词汇判断任务中往往较慢，但他们提取词汇信息的效率与年轻人一样。利用ERP方法，当前的项目将阐明在词汇加工任务中RT分布和ERP成分的特征之间的关系，以及它们如何随着年龄的变化而变化。这个项目的智力价值来自于扩展DePaul大学的研究能力的目标，包括神经科学和生理学方法。这些方法将允许教师和学生探索更深层次的问题，如上所述。研究的核心是关注人类认知功能随时间的变化，这是一个重要的问题，因为美国人口老龄化和劳动力中老年人的数量不断增加。这项研究的更广泛影响还源于其在从认知到社会心理学和决策科学等多个研究领域的适用性。

With the support from the National Science Foundation's Major Research Instrumentation Program, Dr. Joseph A. Mikels and his four co-investigators will purchase an integrated electroencephalography/event related potential (EEG/ERP) acquisition system with eye tracking and physiology measurement capabilities. With these technologies, the research team will explore the neural and physiological underpinnings of several affective, social, and cognitive phenomena across the adult life span. This equipment will strengthen the teaching, training, and research infrastructure necessary to better serve DePaul University undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty. This teaching and research laboratory will serve the needs of both the faculty and students in several departments, and will represent a centerpiece program that will enable DePaul to become a competitive institution in the health and life sciences. The research team includes active researchers in the field of emotion, cognition, social psychology, and neuroscience. Five collaborative research projects are proposed. Project 1 focuses on how changes in emotion and cognition across the adult life span influence decision making. The PI will measure EEG/ERP alongside physiological measures of emotional arousal to understand the underpinnings of age-related changes in decision making. Tasks will be administered in which older adults demonstrate biased and non-optimal choices in different contexts of information presentation, for instance the framing effect and ratio bias phenomenon. Project 2 will explore the causal mechanism underlying motivational shifts that occur in reaction to the finitude of life and life experiences. The project will utilize ERP methods to understand how mortality salience and emotional factors influence brain activation and information processing in older and younger adults. This work will also extend the evaluation of similarities between two pitted theories - Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (SST) and Terror Management Theory (TMT) - to the domain of art appreciation. Project 3 will use ERP and eye-tracking methods to examine the neural mechanisms of age differences in the processing of emotionally valenced information (i.e., the positivity effect) in the context of naturalistic evaluations. In addition this project will examine how the relationship between these judgment phenomena potentially affects age-related differences in home-loan choices. Extending SST and the positivity effect to this domain promises to shed light upon how to better protect seniors from fraud. Project 4 explores how working memory capacity affects cerebral localizations of various inference generations during reading. In addition, researchers will examine the time course under which inferences occur in younger as well as older adults while reading narrative text. Project 5 will use ERP methods to better elucidate the precise time course of lexical processing above and beyond traditional reaction time (RT) measures across the adult life span. Interestingly, older adults tend to be slower in lexical decision tasks, but they extract the lexical information as efficiently as younger adults. Using ERP methods, the current project will shed light on the relationship between features in RT distributions and ERP components in a lexical processing task and how they change as a function of aging.This project draws its intellectual merit from the goal of extending the research capabilities at DePaul University to include neuroscience and physiology methods. These methods will allow the faculty and students to explore questions of a deeper nature, as described above.The core of the research concerns changes in human cognitive function over time and this is an issue of importance given the aging population of the United States and the increasing numbers of older individuals in the workforce. The broader impact of this research also stems from its applicability across several domains of inquiry from cognition to social psychology and decision sciences from a life-span perspective.