Contributed by Brenda Mackey
Graduate Assistant, Research Publications
Sponsored Programs Office, Ball State University
What do zombies and
Stephanie Simon-Dack, assistant
professor of psychological science, have in common?
“Neuroscientists almost always tend to be obsessed with
zombies. And it’s because zombies love brains, we love brains,” she explained.
“There’s an affinity.”
The grant allowed her to purchase Electroencephalography
(EEG) equipment to record event-related potentials, which show highly accurate
timing of brain response – exactly when the brain is doing what.
As displayed in the photo below, the EEG looks like something from a science fiction movie consisting of a cap with a series of electrodes that are attached to an
amplifier. “When you append those electrodes to somebody’s scalp, on the top of
the surface of their head, they record the electrical activity being generated
from the surface of the cortex, from the brain,” Simon-Dack explained. “EEG
uses these amplified recording mechanisms to pick up the synchronized power of
all these cortical neurons firing together – if they’re all firing together,
then that’s going to be a powerful enough signal that you’re going to be able
to get it up outside of the scalp.”
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| Professor Stephanie Simon-Dack performs test using EEG equipment. |
The researcher sets participants’ neurons to firing by
giving them a task. One simple test shows pictures of frogs, asking
participants to push a button when a blue frog appears. The EEG is programmed
to put a 1 in the data readout every time a green frog is displayed and a 2 for
each blue frog. “That becomes super powerful. So I’m not just getting a general
processing idea. I can look at the recordings we were making of their brain
activity and I can look across all of those green frog trials – what did their
brain do that was the same every time they saw the green frog, and did that
vary when they saw the blue frog?”” Simon-Dack said. “Now I’m getting what
parts of the brain are processing that information. And not so much what parts,
but
when are they processing it?”
A big part of Simon-Dack’s research involves how individuals
process time. To do this, she is examining how fast the two hemispheres of the
brain communicate with each other. “Does that efficiency or inefficiency of
transfer coordinate with how well or poorly we process time?” she pondered.
“There’s some evidence it may be related to our ability to put together events
in a linear fashion in time. Now I’m looking very small, within hundreds of
milliseconds, but that eventually might lead to different types of time
subjectivity.”
To test this, participants will perform a simple response
time task that lets Simon-Dack probe how fast the brain is sending information
back and forth based on where the target is and which hand they respond with.
When it comes to transmitting information between the right
and left hemispheres, “how efficiently or inefficiently individuals transfer
information influences a whole variety of spatial and intentional processing,”
Simon-Dack explained. “It’s an unconscious activity. I’m not looking at
anything at an upper level, like decision-making or anything crazy. I’m very
interested before all that, before we hit the conscious brain – what are these
very basic, automatic underlying processes doing to influence how we later
consciously interact with the world?”
Simon-Dack hopes that her research will someday inform
education and treatment for individuals with
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). “There’s some evidence that
individuals with ADHD have trouble with processing time, with how information
entering into their brains gets sorted into the correct timing of when it
happened,” she explained. “So if we can figure out what exactly is the
disconnect, and how is it related to ADHD, that would become interesting for
maybe giving people with ADHD some compensation techniques.”
Obviously, having an EEG is great for those who study
brains. But is it useful for other researchers?
“I think it expands the context in which people can perform
their research,” Simon-Dack said. “Most people aren’t into neuroscience like
me. But it allows somebody like Mike Tagler [associate professor of
psychological science], who’s on this grant, who looks at how context and how
past information exposure influences decision making to actually add this
element where they can look online at what the brain is doing while somebody is
performing that decision, based on the context they’ve been given.
“It gives them a new tool, not just to examine behavior, but
even if they’re not a neuro person they can actually now look at the underlying
neuro mechanisms involved with a behavior and that might give them better
information for informing their theories about it. And I think that anyone in
the department could actually do a study with this equipment and learn
something new about their area without it involving this huge shift from what
they’re doing.”
Simon-Dack is excited to have this equipment at Ball State.
“The idea of an MRI grant is you’re bringing equipment that a university
otherwise wouldn’t have access to,” she said. “It’s going to benefit the whole
university and potentially even outside the university, individuals who
otherwise would not be able to perform this kind of research.”
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| Assistant Professor Stephanie Simon-Dack poses with EEG analysis equipment. |
