WASHINGTON AND LEE

UNIVERSITY

 

Cognitive Neuroscience Labs
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LORETA image of Olfactory P300

 

 

 

The CNL consists of six rooms devoted to the recording and analysis of brain electrical activity and eye movement during olfactory stimulation. The lab is located on the first floor of the newly-renovated Parmly Hall in Washington and Lee's new $23 million science center. The main suite contains two rooms for testing subjects, a control room for monitoring subjects and equipment, a prep room with sink and fume hood for sample preparation, and a data analysis room. These rooms are specially ventilated to facilitate work with odors. Recently, a room has been added exclusively for demonstrations and student projects.

 
Students working in the lab use a new Active2 96 channel EEG system (Biosemi) or one of the two 32-channel Neuroscan Syn-Amps. An ASL 504 eyetracker is also available in Lab 1 and can be used in conjunction with the Active2 system to evaluate brain activity as the eye focus on different parts of a complex image. In addition to the EEG equipment, a rack of Coulbourn Instruments amplifiers and controllers are interfaced to the computers which control the experiments. This allows the EEG systems to be triggered by subject physiology. In many of our applications, this means using subjects' respiratory cycle to trigger collection of EEG/ERP data. Two of the three testing rooms also contain computer-controlled olfactometers for the presentation of olfactory stimuli.

In addition to the computers used to record ERPs and control the experiments, the lab also contains several computers for file service and data analysis. A Mac G4 is available for a collaborative project on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with the University of Chicago. Most data analyses are conducted using MATLAB, a high-level mathematical and graphical language. AFNI is used to analyze the fMRI data and additional analyses are conducted using a variety of statistical software packages such as SPSS, and |Stat.

Washington and Lee has generously funded the lab and other funding has been provided through gifts and grants by the Keck Foundation,  International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF), Proctor & Gamble Corporation,  The Sense of Smell Institute, and The National Institutes of Health (both NIDCD and NIEHS).