Measuring attention using cross-brain correlations in a real setting

Introduction

In this lab, we will measure correlations across brains, as a measure of attention. The idea is that, the more people pay attention to a stimulus, the more their brain is driven by a stimulus and not their internal thoughts. If it is driven by the stimulus, then brain signals across different sessions should be similar.

Data

We collected some data in a real classroom. You can find it here.

Setup

First, install the libraries:

cd recording
npm install
pip install -r requirements.txt

(If you don't have npm, you can install by running brew install node. You can get brew from https://brew.sh/)

Time sync

To make sure the timestamps are synced across computers, run this to sync to Apple time servers: ntpdate -s time.apple.com

Stimulus Presentation + Recording

• Attach electrodes to participant's head, 2 on the frontal cortex (on forehead) and 2 on temporal lobe (right above the ears).
• Connect to the ganglion and stream data: cd recording; node ganglion-lsl.js
• Run lsl-viewer to check connections and stream: cd recording; python lsl-viewer.py
• Record data: cd recording; python lsl-record.py
• Stop recording data by pressing Control-C in the lsl-record.py script

Analysis

Check out the iPython Notebooks in the analysis directory!