Electrophysiological approaches in the study of cognitive development outside the lab

PIETTO, MARCOS L.; KAMIENKOWSKI, JUAN; LIPINA, SEBASTIAN J.

Buenos Aires

Congreso; 2nd FALAN Congress; 2016

FALAN

The electrophysiological level of analysis of cognitive development provides hightemporal resolution information of the neural activity underlying the dynamics of neurocognitive processes. Thus, such methodologies have important implications in building knowledge on cognitive development during childhood. However, electrophysiological (EEG) research is not generally applied beyond laboratory settings, adding some confounding variation related to the new environment and limitations regarding the number of experimental sessions and the size of the final sample. In addition, EEG apparatus typically imposes limitations for use outside the laboratory, such as an increment of noise, and more complicated logistics and transportation. Therefore, it is important to broaden the efforts in extending the design and implementation of theseapproaches. Recently, low-cost portable electroencephalography (EEG) equipments are being released. These EEG systems comprise a smaller array of electrodes that transfered the data via wireless -at also smaller sample rates-, and require little adjustment and time-montage. This make them ideal for their use outside laboratory setting, for instance at school. Needless to say, it has been shown that this technology has typically poorer quality signal than standard research devices, thus robust paradigms and new analytic methods are needed to deal with these issues. In this regard, efforts aimed at transferring laboratory methodologies to be applied in different developmental contexts would result in the possibility of extending their inclusion in studies with greater ecological value. Event-related potentials (ERPs) are useful for quality testing of electrophysiological data across different EEG systems, because they aresimple, fast to compute, offers high temporal resolution and accuracy. Inaddition, there is an extensive ERP research which facilitates comparisonand interpretation of different findings. In this study we explored throughdifferent paradigms if event-related potentials (ERPs) measured using aportable EEG system were equivalent in amplitude and latency to thosemeasured by a high-quality EEG system. Particularly, in this poster wepresent results from a Go/No-Go task and evaluate amplitude and latency ofN1 and N2, and from the effect size between conditions.