SYSTEM FOR MONITORING SOCIAL COGNITIVE BRAIN FUNCTION

描述（由申请人提供）：社会神经科学这一新兴领域正在弥合认知和情感的大脑机制与影响人际态度和行为的社会和动机因素之间的知识差距。然而，迄今为止，可用于测量社会脑功能的工具主要局限于记录个体的神经反应的实验，被限制在扫描仪中，对社会重要性的刺激。为了解决这一限制，我们的目标是开发一个突破性的硬件/软件系统，用于同步获取，分析，访问和可视化来自两个或更多参与者从事共同活动的神经生理数据。这种低成本、高度自动化的系统将能够记录和分析参与社交互动的多人的连续脑电图和亚秒ERP信号。它将把脑电图信号分析方面积累的专业知识集成到自动化软件中，这将大大减少从中提取有用信息所需的劳动和知识。在第一阶段，我们将实现一个原型系统，用于同时记录两个人的大脑功能。为了证明可行性，该系统将用于一个小型实验，该实验将利用高度控制的双人计算机任务来研究游戏式环境中的竞争互动，以及更自然的任务，这些任务将提供更少结构化社会互动特征的数据。由此产生的新数据库将用于通过测试人际因素对神经生理参数影响的假设来证明可行性，并作为设计用于此类多人实验的新分析功能的资源。在第二阶段将实施一个完整的、精细化的数据采集和分析系统，并在与其他实验室的合作研究中加以评价。因此，第二阶段的成果将是一种技术，它将为研究社会现象的科学家提供直接、连续的大脑功能常规测量。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The emerging field of social neuroscience is bridging the knowledge gap between brain mechanisms of cognition and affect and the social and motivational factors that impact interpersonal attitudes and behaviors. However, to date, the tools available for measuring social brain function have mainly restricted experimentation to recording the neural responses of an individual, confined in a scanner, to stimuli of social importance. To address this limitation we aim to develop a breakthrough hardware/software system for synchronously acquiring, analyzing, accessing and visualizing neurophysiological data from two or more participants engaged in a common activity. This low-cost, highly-automated system will enable the recording and analysis of continuous EEG and sub-second ERP signals from multiple people engaged in a social interaction. It will embody accumulated expertise about the analysis of EEG signals into automated software that will vastly reduce the labor and knowledge required to extract useful information from them. In Phase I we will implement a prototype system for simultaneously recording brain function from two people. To demonstrate feasibility, this system will be used to enable a small experiment that will utilize both highly controlled two-person computer-based tasks to study competitive interactions in a game-like context, and more naturalistic tasks that will provide data more characteristic of less structured social interactions. The resulting novel database will be used to demonstrate feasibility by testing hypotheses concerning the impact of interpersonal factors on neurophysiologic parameters, and as a resource for designing new analysis functionality for use in such multiple-person experiments. A complete, refined, data acquisition and analysis system would be implemented during Phase II and evaluated in collaborative studies with other laboratories. The outcome of Phase II will thus be a technology that will make direct, continuous measurements of brain function routinely available to scientists studying social phenomena.