Cognitive Science and Neuroscience Methods: EEG, fMRI, Eye Tracking, Language, and Body Ownership

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering neuroimaging (EEG, ERPs, fMRI), experimental linguistics, body ownership paradigms, and eye-tracking methodologies in cognitive science.

Oscillatory Activity

Ongoing rhythmic brain-wave activity occurring at specific frequency bands (such as delta, theta, alpha, beta, and gamma) that propagates through the cortex and is associated with cognitive processes or mental states.

Event-Related Potentials (ERPs)

Voltage fluctuations in electroencephalographic recordings time-locked to sensory, cognitive, or motor events, generated by the summation of postsynaptic potentials from similarly oriented neurons.

N400

A negative-going event-related potential component peaking around $400\,\text{ms}$ post-stimulus that is elicited by semantically incongruent words, infrequent words, or unrelated word pairs, reflecting semantic integration difficulty or cognitive load.

P600

A positive-going event-related potential component peaking around $600\,\text{ms}$ following a stimulus, elicited by syntactic violations in sentences or structural rule violations in music.

Anatomical Connectivity

The physical network of structural connections and axonal pathways linking individual neurons or anatomical regions in biological tissue.

Functional Connectivity

The statistical correlation or temporal coherence between neurophysiological activity levels across distinct brain regions, indicating co-activation without demonstrating a direct causal relationship.

Effective Connectivity

The directed causal influence and information flow that one neural system exerts over another, inferred through statistical modeling rather than measured directly by brain-imaging techniques.

Voxel

A three-dimensional cubic unit of measurement in functional neuroimaging, typically measuring roughly $0.5\,\text{mm}$ to $3\,\text{mm}$ (sometimes up to $4\,\text{mm}$) per side and encompassing hundreds of thousands of neurons.

Volumetric Statistical Map

A 3D spatial array of voxels generated in fMRI where each voxel contains numerical values representing statistical differences between conditions or correlation values across brain areas.

Forward Inference

An experimental research design in neuroimaging that begins with a hypothesis about a cognitive process, manipulates conditions while controlling extraneous variables, and attributes observed neural differences to that manipulation.

Reverse Inference

An inferential practice that deduces the engagement of a specific cognitive process from observed brain activation in a region, relying on prior literature linking that region to that process despite the lack of one-to-one mapping.

Dual-Track Theory

Joshua Greene's moral judgment framework proposing that impersonal moral dilemmas engage a cognitive reasoning track, whereas personal moral dilemmas activate an emotional reasoning track.

Default Mode Network (DMN)

A network of interconnected cortical structures active during quiet rest, internally focused thought, and daydreaming, which attenuates when attention is directed toward demanding external cognitive tasks.

10–20 System

An international standardized method for placing EEG electrodes on the scalp, where the numbers 10 and 20 denote electrode spacings corresponding to $10\%$ or $20\%$ of the total front-to-back or lateral cranial measurements.

Electrocorticography (ECoG)

An invasive electrophysiological technique where electrode grids are placed directly on the cerebral cortex during neurosurgery to monitor clinical seizures and record localized neural activity.

Restricted Environmental Stimulation Therapy (REST)

A sensory isolation method, frequently using flotation tanks, designed to minimize visual, auditory, and tactile stimulation, eliciting enhanced alpha and theta oscillations associated with deep relaxation.

Dipole

A pair of equal and oppositely charged poles created by the flow of current during postsynaptic potentials; when generated by many similarly oriented pyramidal neurons, their summation is detectable at the scalp as an ERP.

Oddball Paradigm

An experimental design in which sequences of frequent baseline stimuli (e.g., $80\%$ Xs) are interspersed with infrequent oddball stimuli (e.g., $20\%$ Os) to study neural detection of novelty and probability.

P3 (P300)

A prominent positive ERP component that shows larger amplitude and prolonged latency for infrequent stimuli relative to frequent stimuli, peaking prominently across parietal-central midline electrodes ($P_z$).

N170

A negative event-related potential component peaking around $170\,\text{ms}$ post-stimulus, which shows greater amplitude for human faces as well as visual objects in individuals with specific perceptual expertise.

Fusiform Face Area (FFA)

A discrete area in the ventral temporal cortex that exhibits preferential fMRI activation in response to human faces and categories for which a viewer has acquired perceptual visual expertise.

Parahippocampal Place Area (PPA)

A functional region of the parahippocampal cortex that selectively activates when viewing spatial environments, landmarks, and navigational scenes.

Lateral Occipital Complex (LOC)

A functional visual area in the lateral occipital lobe that responds selectively to recognizable objects compared to scrambled visual stimuli.

Extrastriate Body Area (EBA)

A specialized cortical region that shows selective activation during functional brain imaging when participants view human bodies, body parts, or body silhouettes.

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS)

A non-invasive neurostimulation technique that applies transient magnetic pulses to excite or disrupt targeted cortical regions to establish causal relationships between brain areas and cognitive functions.

Direct Measures

Empirical assessments predicated on the assumption that individuals have conscious access to a mental process and can provide explicit subjective or retrospective verbal reports about it.

Indirect Measures

Measurement strategies that assess non-verbal behavioral, ability, or physiological responses to infer underlying cognitive operations when conscious access is absent or unreliable.

Dichotic Listening Paradigm

Donald Broadbent's experimental setup where participants receive two distinct auditory messages played simultaneously into each ear while repeating one stream aloud.

Shadowing

The procedural requirement in dichotic listening experiments where the participant repeats an attended auditory message out loud word-for-word as it is being delivered.

Word-Stem Completion Task

An indirect memory task where participants fill in incomplete words, demonstrating implicit retention and semantic processing of unattended stimuli that cannot be consciously recalled.

Identity Theory

A physicalist philosophy of mind holding that subjective mental states are strictly identical to physical states and neurobiological events of the brain.

Tri-Council Policy Statement

Canada's official ethical policy governing research on human subjects, which stipulates that full protective rights and guidelines apply equally to living participants and separated biological materials such as fluids, tissues, and cells.

Body as Object

Edmund Husserl's concept referring to the perspective wherein a person regards their body as an external physical entity characterized by observable dimensions, shapes, and weights.

Body as Subject

Edmund Husserl's concept referring to the experiential mode where a person lives and acts through their body to interact with the world without attending to the body's physical properties.

Fading Limbs

A rare neurological condition in which an individual acts as though an anatomical limb does not exist unless their attention is explicitly directed toward it.

Phantom Limbs

The persistent, vivid perceptual sensation that a surgically amputated or missing anatomical limb is still attached to the body, often accompanied by physical sensations or severe pain.

Rubber Hand Illusion

An experimental paradigm where synchronous tactile brushing of a subject's hidden real hand and a visible prosthetic hand leads to the subjective embodiment of the artificial hand.

Proprioceptive Drift

The indirect behavioral measurement in body-ownership studies where a participant's blind localization of their real hand shifts spatially toward the location of the artificial hand following synchronous stimulation.

Convergent Evidence

The alignment of empirical support gathered from diverse methods, experimental paradigms, and operational measures pointing to a common underlying psychological mechanism.

Relative Frame of Reference

A viewer-centered spatial coordinate system that defines the location of an object based on the observer's body coordinates and vantage point (e.g., 'to my left' or 'in front of').

Intrinsic Frame of Reference

An object-centered spatial coordinate system where locations are determined relative to the canonical parts and structural facets of the reference object (e.g., 'the top of the can').

Absolute Frame of Reference

An environment-centered spatial coordinate system that defines positions using invariant environmental coordinates, such as cardinal directions (north/south) or terrain features (uphill/downstream).

Acceptability Judgment Task

A psycholinguistic method where participants rate the naturalness and appropriateness of a sentence describing an arrangement of objects on a numerical Likert scale.

Rotation Task

A non-verbal spatial assessment where a participant views an object layout, is physically rotated, and must reconstruct or identify the configuration to reveal whether their mental representation is relative or absolute.

Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis

The linguistic relativity proposition that the grammatical, semantic, and structural systems of specific languages influence or determine how speakers conceptualize and experience reality.

Linguistic Determinism

The strong, largely unsupported formulation of the Whorfian hypothesis stating that language vocabulary and syntax strictly determine and restrict what thoughts and concepts a human mind can construct.

Linguistic Relativity

The moderate formulation of the Whorfian hypothesis asserting that language differences meaningfully influence specific cognitive operations, such as perceptual categorization and discrimination speed.

Saccades

Rapid, ballistic, conjugate eye movements that transition the point of visual fixation from one location to another, continuously repositioning the fovea to capture fine visual detail.

Smooth Pursuit Movements

Voluntary tracking eye movements that smoothly trace a steadily moving visual target to maintain its image upon the fovea, which cannot be executed voluntarily without a moving stimulus.

Vergence Movements

Disjunctive eye movements whereby the eyes turn inward toward one another (convergence) or outward away from one another (divergence) to maintain binocular alignment on objects moving across depths.

Vestibular-Ocular Movements

Reflexive compensatory eye movements driven by the vestibular system that stabilize retinal images during physical movements of the head and body.

Fovea

The central depression in the retina's macula packed with the highest density of cone photoreceptors, providing the sharpest visual spatial resolution and fine color perception.

Dark-Pupil Method

An eye-tracking measurement technique that illuminates the cornea with near-infrared light to compute gaze coordinates from the spatial vector between the corneal reflection (glint) and the center of the pupil.

Scan Path

An eye-tracking visualization displaying the temporal sequence, direction, and duration of discrete fixation points connected by saccadic trajectories as a viewer explores a visual stimulus.

Heat Map

A 2D graphical representation of eye-tracking data that overlays color gradients on a stimulus to depict aggregate fixation duration, with warmer colors indicating areas of prolonged viewing.

Regressions (Eye Tracking)

Backward saccades made during reading to re-inspect previously encountered text, categorized into short regressions (correcting for overshooting predictable words) and long regressions (resolving contextual comprehension difficulties).

Covert Attention

The mental focusing of visual awareness onto an environmental location or internal thought without shifting gaze or moving foveal fixation toward that location.

Area of Interest (AOI)

A predefined spatial boundary delineated by an experimenter over a specific region of a visual display (such as the eyes or mouth) used to aggregate and compare fixation metrics.

Gaze Bias

The empirical tendency for a decision-maker's visual fixations to gravitate toward and linger longer on a specific option right before making a final choice, both reflecting and shaping preference.