Information for study participants

Unfortunately, we need to put a few restrictions on participation:

1. You need to be healthy: this means that you do not have any history of neurological (e.g. epilepsy, stroke) or psychiatric (e.g. depression, schizophrenia) disorders and are not taking any medication that affects your central nervous system and also that you do not have a cold or are currently suffering from allergies which make you cough or sneeze a lot.
2. You should have normal hearing and not use a hearing aid.
3. You cannot have dreadlocks: The electrodes need to be in direct contact with your scalp at very precise positions.
4. You should not have a completely shaved head or be bald: If you do, the resistance of your skin is increased, and our EEG data are not good.
5. You should not have any non-removable metal e.g. piercings, earrings on your scalp or ears as metal distorts the EEG signal.
6. You should be between 18 and 40 years of age, unless another age range is explicitly specified by the experimenter.

Just make sure you have slept enough the night before (however long you need, but at least 6 hours) and did not drink more than a glass of wine/beer within 24 hours prior to the experiment and you did not take any drugs. We want you in your best shape, full of concentration and in a good mood. To ensure that, please make sure you have eaten something so that you will not get hungry during the experiment, and that you did not drink too much, as bathroom breaks during the experiment are difficult.

There are some variations between experiments. However, what all experiments have in common is a preparation time, in which an EEG cap is placed on your head, and then the electrodes are attached to it. Also, there will be a few external electrodes attached to your face (think of them like a cable on a band aid). During EEG recordings you will be engaged in a task related to either  visual or auditory stimulation which will be explained in detail to you before the experiments starts. After the experiment the electrodes will be removed, and you can wash your hair to remove any electrode gel that still sticks to the skin on your head.

There are no known risks of EEG measurements. The electrodes that are placed on your head will measure electrical activity produced by your brain, of course no electric currents will be applied to your scalp! However, if you feel unhappy in any way you can stop the experiment at any point.

1. If you wear a vision aids, please bring it to the experiment as you need a optimal vison before (e.g. reading instructions) and during the experiment (e.g. to fulfill the visual task on a screen). Please bring your glasses instead of contact lenses, if available, to a EEG experiment. Contact lenses tend to make your eyes dry causing unwanted blinking and every blink distorts our EEG data slightly.
2. a comb/brush: After the experiment you will want to wash your hair. We have shampoo, a towel and a hairdryer for you, but you may want to bring a comb or hair brush.
3. experimental hours collection sheet.
4. make up: If you wear make up, we will rub some off of some areas of your face when attaching external electrodes. So if you want to be leaving as pretty looking as you turned up, please bring some make up.

Setting up an EEG experiment takes some time, and we need to make sure every electrode is perfectly connected before we start. Sometimes things work perfectly almost instantly, sometimes getting things to work takes a fair bit of adjustment. Furthermore, during the experiment you can take some breaks. The length and frequency of these will depend on your needs. These variations make it impossible to tell how long exactly the experiment will take.
 

Besides getting insights into certain interesting research topics you get paid 4 Euro every 30 minutes or (if you are a student of Psychology) you can receive credit hours for experiment participation.

The experimenter usually needs to issue a bank transfer. This involves some administrative procedures that can cause several weeks of delay. We try to keep these delays to a minumum, albeit it is not always possible. Thank you for your patience.

You can sign-up in our (Experimental Psychology and Methods and Cognitive and Biological Psychology) database. Our experimenters will browse the database and contact you to invite you to take part in a specific experiment.

The number of experiments conducted at any given time varies. So you may be invited very soon, or may be waiting for several weeks until you get your first invitation. Furthermore, you can increase your chances of being invited shortly by providing an email address as well as a phone number, so that we can reach you easily.

If you do not want to receive any more invites to experiments, email your name and email address or phone number used for subscription to widmann(at)uni-leipzig.de with the subject "unsubscribe".