糖心破解版

Another day and another ‘day in the lab’, and this time I found myself in the Psychology Department meeting Barrie and Liam, the technicians who are, quite literally, the minds behind the mind science! If you’ve read any of the previous blogs in this series, you’ll know the aim is to shine a light on the incredible work of the technicians across the faculty who keep the labs running and the cutting-edge research moving forwards. So, what exactly do Barrie and Liam get up to in psychology?

After successfully navigating the labyrinth of psychology corridors, I arrived at their office to find out more about their varied work. And varied really is the word for it!

One minute they might be maintaining and repairing EEGs - or electroencephalograms, if we’re being technical (the rather futuristic-looking caps pictured below that measure brain activity!) - and the next they could be creating wooden props for scenario-based experiments. No two days are quite the same, and that’s exactly how Barrie and Liam like it!

There is, however, one thing that seems to be a recurring frustration for them both. Being mistaken for ISS! While Barrie and Liam can fix a broken EEG or troubleshoot an eye-tracker, they cannot help you when you’ve been locked out of your email. So, if your password has stopped working, you’ll need to ask someone else!

Much of Barrie and Liam’s day-to-day work revolves around maintaining and repairing the electronics behind the EEG and eye-tracking systems used by psychologists in their experiments. Barrie showed me an EOG - or electro-oculography system, if we’re being technical again! - which measures the eye’s resting electrical potential using small electrodes placed around the eye socket. Researchers can use this technology to track things like gaze direction, eye velocity, and blinking in response to different stimuli.

Barrie with the EEGs and EOGs!

Barrie was in the process of putting one of the systems together when I visited the office, and to my admittedly non-electronics-trained eyes, it looked very complicated indeed! There were wires everywhere, which inevitably means there are plenty of opportunities for something to go wrong. This is where Barrie and Liam’s electronics expertise come in. Their ability to repair and maintain these systems is essential to ensure researchers can collect the data they need.

As they took me around the department, I spotted these technologies being used in all sorts of fascinating research projects, which I’ll tell you about later!

One of the most interesting aspects of Barrie and Liam’s role comes when academics approach them with a research idea but aren’t quite sure what equipment or technology they need to bring it to life. Where researchers have funding to purchase specialist software or equipment, Barrie and Liam can help source and procure what’s required. But when an academic arrives - as Barrie put it - “needing something, but they don’t really know what”, that’s when the detective work really begins!

They’ll delve into the academic’s research papers to work out exactly what technology could turn the research idea into something tangible. This is a clear example of just how much skill the technicians bring to the departments. They aren’t simply keeping the equipment running, they are also often helping the academics to work out what equipment they need in the first place!

The first stop on our tour of the department was a series of stimulus presentation experiments. While ‘stimulus presentation’ might sound more like something from a game show, it is actually a crucial part of many psychology studies. Researchers carefully control what participants see, hear, or feel in order to understand how the brain processes information. A major part of Barrie and Liam’s role involves coding these experiments or developing the software that controls when stimuli are presented.

One example was a tactile stimulation unit, pictured below, which Barrie had built for the research of cognitive neuroscientist Brandon O’Hanlon. Brandon’s work investigates multisensory integration (there’s those technical terms again!). In other words, how our different senses work together to help us make sense of the world. Participants place their finger on the device and receive tactile feedback that complements the audio they are hearing.

The tactile simulation unit!

The most impressive part? Barrie built the device from scratch using a repurposed disk drive, proving that one person’s computer junk is another’s cutting-edge experimental research equipment!

Next, Barrie and Liam took me into one of the labs where they had recently supported PhD researcher Jessica Andrew with her work investigating the effects of sports-related head impacts on auditory neural encoding (another technical term for you!) Put simply, Jessica is exploring how sports injuries might affect the speed with which the brain processes sound.

To support the project, Barrie and Liam designed a custom trigger box and used MATLAB and Python to code the timing of the various stimuli presented to participants. Their job was to ensure everything happened in perfect synchrony, allowing researchers to accurately compare when a sound was played with how quickly the brain responded. We’re talking milliseconds of precision here! It’s a level of technical expertise that most of us never see, but without it many of these studies would remain little more than an idea on a piece of paper.

Next, we headed into the Infant and Child Development labs, where Barrie showed me the fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy!) used on some of the department’s youngest research participants. These fNIRs allow researchers to measure brain activity while babies and children play or interact with others, allowing psychologists understand how the brain develops during childhood.

The fNIRS in the Infant and Child Development labs!

Of course, there is one small problem when your research participant is a baby. They don’t understand that they are in an experiment! Put a strange-looking cap covered in wires and electrodes on a toddler’s head, and their first instinct is understandably to pull it straight back off!

To solve this problem, Barrie has designed a special headband to help keep the fNIRS in place. As I found out, making something that looks relatively simple requires rather more work than you might expect. Barrie creates a rubber template, pours the material into it, and produces a cast to make the finished headband. It’s a surprisingly big process for something that is ultimately going to sit on a very small head, but it’s another great example of the practical expertise of the technicians.

We then headed into a lab that looks like a school classroom. But don’t be fooled, this is no real classroom and there is considerably more technology hidden here than meets the eye!

The school bags in the classroom pictured below contain eye-tracking devices and audio/throat microphones, while cameras positioned around the room enable motion capture. This allows researchers to track where children are looking and how they interact with their surroundings. There is even a multi-channel audio system that recreates the sounds of a normal classroom, helping the environment feel as realistic as possible.

Liam holding up one of the eye-trackers from the children’s ‘school backpacks’ in the ‘school classroom’!

Behind all of this, of course, are Barrie and Liam. They have designed the trigger system and synchronisation unit that links all these different technologies together, ensuring that the cameras, eye-trackers, audio, and other equipment are all singing from the same hymn sheet and that everything runs in perfect synchronisation during the experiments.

As if keeping sophisticated research equipment up and running wasn’t enough, Barrie and Liam also often swap their electronics expertise for some good old-fashioned ‘make do and mend’ in the mechanical workshop. Here, they become the department’s unofficial prop masters, creating the practical bits and pieces that behavioural psychologists need for their experiments.

This work is incredibly varied and often involves making something from whatever materials are available when research budgets don’t stretch to buying-in specialist equipment - using saws, sewing machines, and scrap materials to bring an academic’s idea to life. One example is the curiosity board pictured below.

The curiosity board used in a child-friendly experiment.

Barrie in the workshop pictured with the sewing machine!

Another particularly fascinating example is the piece of equipment Barrie is pictured with below, which looks like it could have been borrowed straight from the set of The Terminator rather than a university lab! But fear not, this is no robot uprising - Barrie built it to create the illusion that an electronic hand belongs to the participant as part of an experiment exploring how easily the brain can be tricked into perceiving it as part of the actual body.

Barrie wearing the robotic hand!

I had a wonderful afternoon with Barrie and Liam exploring the Psychology Department, and I learnt so much about what goes on behind the scenes. From building EEGs and designing electronic hands, to coding experiments and transforming labs into classrooms, Barrie and Liam really are the beating heart of the research happening there.

I hope you’ve enjoyed getting a glimpse into their work just as much as I did, and I’ll see you next time for another ‘Day in the Lab’!

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