Cognitive Neuroscience Experimental Design
8 weeks · 0 milestones
Design a complete cognitive neuroscience experiment to test a specific hypothesis about a cognitive process — attention, working memory, decision-making, language, emotion, perception, or executive function. The design must specify: research question and hypothesis, experimental paradigm (blocked vs. event-related; stimulus presentation; trial structure), participant criteria and sample size with power analysis, neuroimaging or physiological methodology (fMRI, EEG, MEG, eye-tracking, or equivalent), analysis pipeline, and ethics considerations. A complete experimental design requires no equipment — the methodology document is the artifact. The proof is the design document reviewed by a neuroscientist who identifies at least one uncontrolled confound in the design; the student's written response proposing either a methodological fix or arguing that the confound does not threaten the primary hypothesis is a required part of the proof. This documented exchange confirms that the student can engage with methodological criticism, not just produce a design document.
Milestone map
Milestone map
3 milestones
Select a specific cognitive neuroscience research question and design an experimental paradigm to address it. Accessible alternative: if neuroimaging equipment is unavailable, design a behavioural paradigm (no specialist equipment needed — online tools such as jsPsych or Gorilla run in a browser) or design an analysis of an existing open neuroimaging dataset from OpenNeuro. Human participant ethics approval is not required for this design milestone, but must be addressed if M2 involves real data collection.
Proof required
Submit your research question (one specific sentence), the experimental paradigm design (task structure, stimuli, conditions, response measures, and trial structure), a power analysis justifying your target sample size, and a brief section addressing how the paradigm isolates the cognitive function of interest from confounds.
What gets checked
- Research question names a specific cognitive function or process — not 'how does the brain process attention' but 'how does spatial cueing of attention affect response time to lateralised targets'
- Paradigm design specifies the independent variable, dependent variable, and the key control conditions that isolate the cognitive function from confounds
- Power analysis references a prior effect size from the published literature for a similar paradigm — not a generic 'I need 30 participants'