Brain imaging methodology represents a new area of cognitive neuroscience that allows systems level analysis of human cognition. The program faculty has been at the forefront of this exciting cutting- edge technology. Brain imaging provides a biological link to complex tasks such as visual attentional control, memory storage and language interpretation. By measuring functional brain changes associated with specific tasks, we can build a better understanding of the components and stages of cognitive processing. Students focusing their research in this area require training in systems neuroscience, cortical anatomy, behavioral task design, image processing, and statistical analysis.
The program has access to state of the art facilities for brain imaging research. The major techniques include functional magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), Positron Emission Tomography (PET), and high density evoked response potential (HD-ERP) recording. Brain imaging with fMRI utilizes MRI technology to provide millimeter spatial resolution maps (Schneider, Noll & Cohen, 1993; Cohen, Noll & Schnediier, 1993, Schneider, Casey, & Noll, 1994) of human cortical activation with sufficient sensitivity to reliably identify regions of activation in as little as 10 seconds of recording and to repeatedly examine an area to determine the selectivity of processing. PET involves radioactive labeling of isotopes that can trace chemical reactions in the brain. PET recordings last a minute to an hour depending on the isotope. PET provides full-brain imaging of small number of conditions generally requiring summation over subjects. HD-ERP involves recording from 64 recording sites measuring brain waves. It provides millisecond temporal resolution with poor spatiial resolution. We can run subjects sequentially across each of the techniques to develop multiple constraints such as spatially localizing generators with fMRI and then determining the time basis functions of the generators with HD-ERP.