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项目的支持下，Joseph A. Mikels博士和他的四位合作研究者将购买一套集成脑电图/事件相关电位（EEG/ERP）采集系统，该系统具有眼动追踪和生理测量功能。借助这些技术，研究团队将探索成人一生中几种情感、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满足几个部门的教师和学生的需求，并将代表一个核心项目，使DePaul成为一个在健康和生命科学领域具有竞争力的机构。研究团队包括情感、认知、社会心理学和神经科学领域的活跃研究人员。提出了5个合作研究项目。项目1侧重于成年人一生中情绪和认知的变化如何影响决策。PI将测量脑电图/ERP以及情绪唤醒的生理测量，以了解决策中与年龄相关的变化的基础。在任务中，老年人在不同的信息呈现情境中表现出偏见和非最佳选择，例如框架效应和比例偏见现象。项目2将探讨在对生命和生活经历的有限性作出反应时发生的动机转变的因果机制。该项目将利用ERP方法来了解死亡率显著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。这项工作还将扩展对社会情绪选择理论（SST）和恐怖管理理论（TMT）这两种理论之间相似性的评估，并将其应用于艺术欣赏领域。项目3将使用ERP和眼动追踪方法来研究在自然评价背景下情绪价值信息处理（即积极效应）的年龄差异的神经机制。此外，本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差异。将SST和积极效应扩展到这一领域，有望揭示如何更好地保护老年人免受欺诈。项目4探讨工作记忆容量如何影响阅读过程中不同推理代的大脑定位。此外，研究人员还将研究年轻人和老年人在阅读叙事文本时进行推理的时间过程。项目5将使用ERP方法来更好地阐明在整个成人生命周期中词汇加工的精确时间过程，超越传统的反应时间（RT）测量。有趣的是，老年人在词汇决策任务中往往反应较慢，但他们提取词汇信息的效率与年轻人一样高。使用ERP方法，本项目将揭示词汇处理任务中RT分布和ERP组件之间的关系，以及它们如何随着年龄的增长而变化。这个项目从扩展德保罗大学的研究能力到包括神经科学和生理学方法的目标中汲取了智力上的优点。如上所述，这些方法将允许教师和学生探索更深层次的问题。这项研究的核心是人类认知功能随时间的变化，鉴于美国人口老龄化和劳动力中老年人数量的增加，这是一个重要的问题。这项研究的广泛影响还源于它在从认知到社会心理学和决策科学的几个领域的适用性。

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.