Natalie Prowse, a third year Neuroscience student shares her I-CUREUS experience.
Please outline your role as an I-CUREUS participant (what research support were you providing?)
I was tasked with finishing and documenting a program which uses a suite of software called EEGLab for the Neuroscience of Imagination Cognition and Emotion Research (NICER) Lab. EEGLab is an open source package to clean, process and analyze Electroencephalogram (EEG) data from a variety of acquisition systems. EEG systems are widely used in neuroscience and human behaviour research to analyze brain activity, in order to determine which brain regions are active while participants are performing various tasks. A variety of neuroscience studies examine things like the effect of music training on children’s attention. EEGs have very good temporal resolution and can record activity in the brain down to the millisecond, but can only record from broad regions of the brain, due to the limited number of electrodes that can cover the head and the fact that millions of neurons are contributing to the signals received by an electrode.
What problem is this research trying to tackle?
The ERP data provides information which informs hypotheses about which brain regions are involved in various cognitive processes. The problem is that while the brain itself produces electrical signals when active, the data is often littered with “artifacts” – when a person blinks, squints, moves their head, or clenches their jaw, the signal is distorted by the electrical activity produced by physical movement.
The program I was tasked with completing is designed to essentially improve data collection and processing. New lab members often have little or no prior background in EEG systems, so I was also tasked with writing documentation and an initial guide to EEG data processing.
What skills have you gained from the experience?
In order to complete the project, I had to learn how to use the EEGLab system. This system is very popular in the neuroscience community and a very valuable skill to have if I go on to do human behavior research in graduate school, and is great to put on my resume for my graduate school applications. I also had to learn how to use and program in Matlab, which is a very valuable tool for researchers, for both its built-in capabilities for statistical analysis of data, and for developing custom functional tools to manipulate data.
What would you tell future students considering participating in I-CUREUS?
This is a great program to provide a bit of extra income for textbooks and tuition, while developing real skills that you wouldn’t get in a classroom setting. Through this program, you can broaden your horizons and get hands-on experience in new research areas that you may want to pursue in future. The program exposes you to the real challenges faced during real research studies prior to working on your honours thesis. It emphasizes the necessity for a detailed timeline prior to beginning a project and the benefit of having this timeline to achieve your goals.