Facilities

Our lab has access to an outstanding combination of facilities and resources: state-of-the-art neuroimaging and eyetracking facilities and a network of high-speed computers for modeling and data analysis, as well as access to a large undergraduate subject pool and other subject populations (e.g. children with dyslexia or specific language impairments).

Lab rooms and offices are concentrated in the UW Psychology Building (WJ Brogden Hall) at 1202 W Johnson St. On the sixth floor, we have a suite of large rooms used primarily for offices (for graduate students, research assistants, visitors). The high-speed multiprocessor linux machines that we use for computational modeling are also housed there, along with the usual range of peripherals. Professors MacDonald's and Seidenberg's offices are located on the fifth floor. On the second floor, we have two rooms for running human subjects: the first room contains two acoustically isolated chambers, each equipped with an iMac running PsyScope and audio recording equipment; the other room houses a network of 10 PCs running MEL and E-Prime, on which we can simultaneously run up to 9 subjects on various types of non-auditory tasks. Additionally, we have recently purchased ASL Model 501 and 504 eyetracker systems, and are currently programming them to work with E-Prime in eyetracking experiments.

Through the introductory psych courses, our lab has access to a massive undergraduate subject pool, which greatly facilitates running behavioral experiments (students are given extra credit points if they participate in at least 7.5 hours of experiments). The psychology department also provides outstanding support for research, mainly in the form of an excellent administrative staff and several highly competent technical support staff who handle tasks ranging from software development to building research labs.

We conduct our neuroimaging research at the W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging & Behavior, located in the new wing of the Waisman Center. The Keck Lab is a research-only facility, directed by Dr. Richard J. Davidson of the psychology department. It includes a new 3T magnetic resonance scanner (MRI) for both functional and structural brain imaging studies, as well as a 1.5T MRI machine that has been used for research for several years.

The Waisman Center is a large, interdisciplinary facility dedicated to the study of human development, developmental disabilities, and neurodegenerative diseases. In addition to housing the Keck neuroimaging facility, Waisman provides important services related to the conduct of developmental research, such as help in recruiting children with reading or language impairments.