MRI: Acquisition of an EEG for Cognitive Research

This project supports the acquisition of an integrated electroencephalography (EEG) system (ActiCHamp 64 active-electrodes, Brain Products GmbH) to establish the first EEG laboratory at The State University of New York at Old Westbury (SUNY-OW). With 60-70% of the student body identifying as coming from a historically underrepresented minority population, SUNY-OW is the most diverse campus within the 64-campus SUNY system and one of the most diverse campuses in the United States.

EEG is a non-invasive neuroimaging technique that allows the monitoring of human cerebral activity with millisecond precision while neurocognitive processes unfold in real-time. When these cognitive processes are time-locked to an event and then averaged over multiple trials, the resulting event-related potentials (ERPs) can provide rich temporal and spatial data related to when and where neurocognitive processes occur.

The EEG laboratory at SUNY-OW is critical in developing cutting-edge research in cognitive, affective, and social neuroscience to educate and train its students. This award enables a unique initiative to establish an interdisciplinary research program in electrophysiology and cognitive neuroscience that includes several researchers in biological, cognitive, developmental, social, and clinical psychology, gerontology, and other related fields.

The EEG laboratory will create a unique research and training consortium between SUNY-OW and surrounding campuses, including The New York Institute of Technology, SUNY at Farmingdale, Long Island University, and local community colleges and high schools. By providing cutting-edge neuroscience research and training opportunities for SUNY-OW’s undergraduate and graduate students, researchers will increase predominantly underrepresented students skills in psychophysiology, neuroscience, and other domains of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).

These skills are highly desirable and transferrable across disciplines spanning industry and academia.

The research focuses on four areas of interest related to emotional and social cognitive processing. First, the team analyzes early, response-locked components that are associated with attention and task engagement to better understand symptoms of depression and anxiety. Second, the investigators investigate whether the subjective ability to sense the body’s internal states is associated with improved senses of “self,” a key predictor of physical and psychological well-being.

Third, the team examines factors influencing cognitive flexibility (i.e., the ability to respond to changes in the environment and/or within tasks) and its association with academic achievement in college. Finally, the researchers examine the difference in internalized stereotypes about aging in younger adults compared to older adults. Although previous behavioral and self-report data provide important, foundational insight into the cognitive processes of interest, the team's analyses provide the opportunity to delineate early attentional orienting cognitive lower-order processes from later, more effortful and self-oriented cognitive higher-order processes associated with memory and emotion activation.

Therefore, the research provides a fine-grained and systematic approach to the cognitive mechanisms that underlie these psychological phenomena and further contribute to the field’s understanding of biopsychosocial and socioemotional processes that can predict multiple domains of wellbeing across the lifespan.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.