Kennedy Lloyd
Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
Research Mentor(s): Jonathan Brennan
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Linguistics / LSA
Program: UROP
Session: Session 3 (11:00am – 11:50am)
Authors: Kennedy Lloyd, Jonathan Brennan
Abstract
Areas of injustice in neuroscience can include the tools that are widely used to measure brain activity in neuroscience research. In particular, tools used for neurolinguistics research, including Electroencephalography or EEG and Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy or fNIRS, to measure brain activity through the scalp are not properly suited for certain types of minority groups. As a result, data collected using these tools likely exhibits quality differences regarding individuals from these marginalized populations, especially those of African-American descent. Currently, there is no published work thoroughly documenting differences in data quality in regard to hair type and skin pigmentation in EEG and fNIRS data. Participants include 60 individuals for the EEG and fNIRS study, half of which self-report as African American and the other half as Caucasian. Participants document their hair type and style. In the EEG study, participants perform a 5-minute auditory task where they listen to 120 1 kHz tones at 45 dB HL which should elicit the auditory evoked potential. In the next task, a 20-minute language task, participants listen to 80 sentences, 40 of which have an unexpected word, which should elicit the N400 evoked potential. Filtering this data will yield time-aligned data epochs, which will be averaged to yield the event-related potential (ERP) that we will estimate the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) from. This SNR is what will determine the quality of the data. The fNIRS procedure involves a language task where participants listen to 25 sentences and an auditory task where participants listen to time-reversed speech and signal-correlated noise. The SNR and other measures of equipment-specific aspects of data quality will be compared between the racial and ethnic groups as well as with individuals’ hair type and characteristics.
