Validation of Neurolinguistic protocols on a portable low-cost EEG equipment

JUANTORENA G; PIETTO ML; TABULLO AJ; BIANCHI B; KAMIENKOWSKI JE

Congreso; XXXIV Reunión Anual de la Sociedad Argentina de Neurociencia; 2019

Electroencephalography (EEG) is a non-invasive neuroimaging method in which cortical electrical activity is recorded with great temporal precision using electrodes placed on the scalp. Experiments with EEG have been critical in the study of language processing, identifying stereotyped responses associated with semantic (N400), or grammatical (LAN / P600) manipulations, among others. These studies are usually carried out in controlled environments within the laboratory, using expensive and complex setup. However, low-cost portable devices have recently appeared. These new advances allowed for experiments to be performed in more ecological environments (e.g. schools or low-income hospitals) opening up a wide range of possible applications. In the present work, we used two classic psycholinguistics tasks to develop a protocol for using a low-cost and high-portability EEG device (EMOTIV EPOC+) to evaluate different linguistic capabilities. We observed significant differences between correctly formulated sentences and sentences with semantic inconsistencies. These differences in brain potentials were observed in the expected latency, but not in the expected polarity. We hypothesized that these discrepancies might be due to the electrodes layout. This study shows promising results for using this type of device outside the laboratory, allowing to study neurocognitive aspects in more natural environments and in massive scale.