Materials for my lab course on cognitive brain imaging
In this lab, you will work with brain activation data in ways that you only read or hear about. You will gain hands-on experience with cutting-edge methods of analyzing and visualizing brain data—the technical details of which you read about in textbooks—to perform such feats as predicting what a person is thinking about or feeling— headlines about which you see in the press, which trumpet sometimes triumph, sometimes peril, for society. In humbler words, the lab portion of the class serves as a hands-on complement to the seminar. The lab focuses on an influential and widely used imaging method in cognitive neuroscience, namely functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). You will work with this exciting technology to see how it has, and continues to, shed light on important neuroscientific questions such as where and how knowledge is represented in the human brain.
Learning objectives:
• Process raw fMRI data in preparation for statistical data analysis;
• Visualize brain activation to discover which brain regions are active, or inactive, in a given cognitive or behavioral task;
• Conduct “mind-reading” to infer what a person is thinking about based on distributed brain activation patterns;
• Predict the brain activation pattern associated with thinking about a specific concept (the inverse of “mind-reading”); and
• State and elaborate on how the above data analysis methods complement each other