[Eeglablist] about a blinking period in an EEG protocol

[José Luis]

Hello,

I’m working at the Clinical Research Unit in the Ville-Evrard Hospital in
France. We are planning to perform EEG studies in psychiatric subjects. In
this context, we would like to do classical experiments such as oddball,
stroop and lexical decision.

Looking the literature on ERP studies, I realise that often these paradigms
do not include a "blinking" period, i.e., a period where one explicitly ask
the participant to perform eye movements (blinking or saccades). I'm aware
of the several methods to correct these artefacts. Also, I'm aware that the
mental effort involved in suppressing eye blinks may impair task
performance, and this can be even more pertinent when we deal with
psychiatric subjects (a simple task can become a double task). However,
could be this be an issue in a purely visual task? because when a subject
blinks during the stimulus display she/he is simply not seeing the stimulus
(or at least not seeing the way it could see it when is not blinking).
Couldn't be better to have a blinking period? Also, even if we remove
artefactual activity from the data, I wonder if blinking could have an
effect on the cognitive process we want to measure,

Any comment will be appreciated,
José Luis

-- 
José Luis ULLOA FULGERI, PhD
https://sites.google.com/site/joseluisulloafulgeri/
33 (0)6.29.50.64.93
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://sccn.ucsd.edu/pipermail/eeglablist/attachments/20150625/60758672/attachment.html>