The purpose of the proposed project is to enhance the student's experience of scientific inquiry in the study of relationships between brain functions and behavior in humans. This goal will be achieved by incorporating contemporary computer-based electroecephalograpic methods, especially measurement of event-related potentials, into our laboratories in biological and experimental psychology. This strategy is based both on the importance of such methods in contemporary research and on the high level of student interest in measuring human brain events and correlating them with behavior. The custom-designed software package, created by an engineer with whom the project has already been extensively discussed, will be written using LabVIEW. This approach will provide software that not only has a convenient user interface, but is also familiar to our students because most will have previously programmed with LabVIEW. Therefore, we will be able to modify the software to address changing needs. Stimuli will be presented by means of a second software package, PsyScope, with which our students are also already familiar. Experiments are planned that introduce students to fundamental event-related potential paradigms - the measurement of the readiness potential preceding motor responses to a predicted stimulus and of the latency or magnitude of the P300 component elicited by visual stimuli. These experiments will be conducted in several different courses. Since students will generally take more than one of these, they will have the opportunity to master the procedures sufficiently to be able to employ them in their own senior research projects. Promising sophomore and junior students will also have the opportunity to work with the project director on experiments employing these methods. Thus, this project will demonstrate a pedagogical approach for bringing these contemporary neuropsychological research methods into undergraduate laboratories.
