Lab Roles

For the 2019-2020 year the lab will be expanding to include two new graduate students! It's been a long time coming, but this is my first attempt at organizing roles for our lab members.

PI: Chris

I'd say this is self-explanatory, except my job description is very nebulous. Right now, it includes:

• Participant Payments
• Covering Expenses
• Methods Development
• Sometimes scanning
• Initial training

fMRI Experiments

Scheduling: Andrew Hall

The person responsible for scheduling should always have available the pool of available time slots for any in-lab or MRI appointments. Responsible experimenters should ensure that this pool is kept up-to-date. Interested participants may contact us via the lab gmail email address or the lab phone number. The person responsible for scheduling should check the lab voicemail at least weekly and the gmail account more often, with the goal of replying to interested participants within 1 week of contact.

Initial scheduling for an fMRI experiment should begin by filtering for eligibility to avoid wasting time and money, and only potentially eligible participants should be scheduled for initial prescreening:

• Healthy adult (18+ years of age) able to give informed consent
• Native English fluency
  • The participant may know other languages but must be able to read/write/speak/comprehend English at the same level of fluency as an adult monolingual speaker
• Right-handed
• No history of neurological or cognitive impairment:
  • Learning disability
  • ADD/ADHD
  • Head injury leading to a concussion
  • History of seizures, stroke, narcolepsy, multiple sclerosis
• Not taking any prescription medication that affects the central nervous system (these drugs may lead to atypical brain functioning, and it may be unsafe to go off medication for 24h prior to scanning):
  • e.g., Adderall or other stimulant for ADD/ADHD
  • e.g., Antidepressants
  • e.g., Medications containing opioids
• Not pregnant or planning to become pregnant
• No metal implants or non-removable piercings
• No history of claustrophobia (the scanner bore is narrow)
• Able to lay relatively still for extended periods of time without discomfort
  • This may preclude individuals with orthopaedic conditions (e.g., back problems)

Data Triage

Following a scan, we will have several MRI files and several MATLAB runtime data files for each participant (theoretically: 1 for each completed run). It should be a priority to ensure that these data are transferred to the UBFS/openfmri folders

MRI Data

The raw MRI data for a participant should go in a folder with the participant name in the /raw/ folder underneath the appropriate project directory. For example, new data for Subject 001 Session 1 in the Semantic Categories experiment (SemCat) would be found in:

• ubfs
  • openfmri
    • SemCat
      • raw
        • 0001_SESS_1

MATLAB Files

The BOLD data for participants is going to be uninperpretable unless we also know the events that happend during the experiment. These file are produced on the Experimenter Laptop during the experiment and can be found in the MUMBLE_MUMBLE folder. These files need to be copied to the matfiles folder for the appropriate project in the ubfs folder. For example, the 6 .mat files for Subject 0001 in the SemCat experiment would be copied to:

• ubfs
  • openfmri
    • SemCat
      • matfiles