MRI: Acquisition of a dual-acquisition high-density EEG with transcranial electrical neuromodulation for psychophysiological research.

This National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation award funds the acquisition of a high-density electroencephalogram (HD-EEG) system with high-density transcranial electric stimulation (HD-tES) neuromodulation technology and time-locked dual acquisition capabilities at Northern Michigan University (NMU). EEG is a non-invasive measure of the brain’s electrical activity with excellent (millisecond level) temporal resolution.

Neuromodulation with HD-tES offers a non-invasive method of experimentally manipulating brain activity with high precision to assess the causal link between neural activation and human behavior. When two (or more) EEG devices are time-locked this method, known as hyperscanning, allows for insight into the neural mechanisms underlying social interactions.

The instrumentation supported by this award is an integrated system with HD-EEG, hyperscanning EEG, and HD-tES functionality. Northern Michigan University, NMU, is a rural predominantly undergraduate institution with a large number of first-generation and low-income students. The instrumentation supported by this award will significantly enhance the research environment at NMU and in doing so provide critical training opportunities for underrepresented undergraduate students in innovative and emergent neuroscience techniques.

The research supported by this award integrates across HD-EEG, hyperscanning, and HD-tES methodologies—representing a new frontier in human neuroscience research that has the potential to transform the field by testing for cause and effect brain-behavior relationships in dyadic social environments.

This award supports collaborative research projects involving faculty and undergraduate students in the areas of affective and cognitive neuroscience as well as social-cogniton, behavioral, and applied fields of psychology. EEG based measures of reward processing have been extensively studied in the context of adaptive and maladaptive behavior. Yet, the underlying neural generator of these reward-based EEG signals remains a point of contention.

The instrumentation supported by this award provides a unique opportunity to electrically stimulate potential neural generators via HD-tES and assess the causal effects of neuromodulation on EEG measures of reward processing. The causal effects of neuromodulation on reward processing are studied in multiple contexts including simple bidding tasks, cognitive training protocols, and operant renewal paradigms modeling relapse behavior.

The research supported by this award utilizes the hyperscanning capabilities of the instrumentation to assess the neural correlates of intrinsic motivation as a function of psychological need fulfillment vs frustration via dyadic social interactions involving cooperation and competition. Hyperscanning is also used to assess differences in EEG-based measures of performance-monitoring in dyadic social environments.

Studies explore the extent to which HD-tES targeting of reward processing and performance monitoring sources can be used to modulate intrinsic motivation and cooperation as well as task performance in cooperative vs competitive dyadic social interactions. In short, the research enabled by this award integrates across HD-EEG, hyperscanning, and HD-tES methodologies with the aim of better understanding the cause and effect relationship between the neural systems involved in reward processing and performance monitoring on human behavior in social contexts

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.