A TMS lab is being established within the Psychology School. Trans-cranial magnetic stimulation is being used to collect data that will help establish which parts of the brain are involved in cognitive tasks that we wish to understand e.g. finding a face in a crowd. It works by creating a very brief magnetic pulse over the scalp. If the brain area directly below this is critical then the pulse is just strong enough to produce a measurable change in reaction times or errors.

We use the BrainVoyager system developed at Maastricht University, Netherlands. We collect structural brain images of our volunteers and can navigate to the brain locations of interest by cross-referencing the skull landmarks on the brain images to the same landmarks on the real head of our volunteers.