This award provides funds to purchase equipment for a newly developed laboratory course in the Department of Psychology at Bryn Mawr College. This course will teach female undergraduates sophisticated techniques to enable them to conduct advanced, publishable research in neural and behavioral sciences. The course will use oscilloscopes, waveform generators, brain stimulators and will deal with Ohm's law, Kirchoff's laws, Thevin's theorem, resistor capacitor networks for low-pass and high-pass filters. Ultimately students will simulate the electrical properties of nerve conduction and ionic conductances. A sciatic nerve lab will introduce the student to principles of recording and to classic nerve conduction experiments. The goal will be the understanding of principles of volume conduction, especially as they apply to the recording of remote potentials in the brain. Use will be made of stimulators, digital oscilloscopes for examination of waveform, and the electrophysiological amplifiers. Chronic recording of EEG will use the computer and the amplifier and the band pass amplifier to enable the student to use power spectral analysis of endogenous rhythmic activity in order to correlate such activity with behavior. Students could conduct research projects on the relation of hippocampal theta rhythms and pharmacological manipulations on recorded activity of single cell. Students will learn how to use the digital oscilloscope and the computer software packages in order to determine the criteria for identifying single units. The grantee institution is matching this NSF award with funds from non-Federal sources.
