Research Support – Laboratory

LiRI offers state-of-the-art facilities & support for researcher in speech production, perceptual or cognitive underpinnings of language.  Our staff can offer experimental and technical support on an ad-hoc basis for studies using EEG, eye-tracking, social communication, and a wide variety of other methods!

We can assist with experimental design, stimuli production, experimental script implimentation & data analysis (including R or MATLAB coding). We also have experience working with populations varying in age from infants to older adults and special populations.  We also provide specialized support in areas such as fMRI, signal processing, and psychoacoustics.

If you require support with the design, analysis, or execution of any projects with these features, please get in touch at lab@linguistik.uzh.ch

Many research groups have the goal of starting neuroimaging projects but face a substantial barrier in having to ‘up-skill’ their group to be able to collect data as there may be knowledge gaps in fMRI methodology, logistics/facilities hiring, ethical approval, analysis, and data collection.

LiRI is able to offer support for all stages of this process, including our collaborative ties with state-of-the-art 3T and 7T MRI scanners in Zurich (including MRI compatible noise-cancellation hardware for precise auditory stimuli presentation). This service allows research groups to start making progress on getting over the initial experience barriers that may occur when first starting an fMRI experiment, or to receive training so that they are able to conduct the project independently without substantial hiring costs.
Our consultation team has experience with:

• leading and obtaining ethical approval for MRI projects with healthy adults and in-utero scanning (as well as report/data storage compliance on multi-national clinical trials)
• MRI safety and data gathering
• designing auditory MRI studies for publication

If there are any aspects of starting a neuroimaging project that present an obstacle, please contact us for a consultation and we’ll see how we can assist you!

Our cognitive neuroscience consultant has over a decade of experience in the field with a particular focus on fundamental psychoacoustics, speech-in-noise, paralinguistic encoding/decoding, and socioaffective communication imaging studies. We can offer research support for the following areas:

• Experimental design: stimuli creation, design for threshold psychophysics, auditory signal processing, experiment presentation (including code support for psychophysics toolbox in MATLAB)
• Functional MRI analysis (including code support in SPM/MATLAB), specialising in: canonical contrasts, network analysis (Dynamic Causal Modelling), machine learning classifiers, reverse correlation, and region-of-interest/time-series modelling.
• Psychoacoustics/Acoustic analyses: complex mixed effects modelling for stimuli-to-response modelling; threshold estimation analyses; signal processing analyses (e.g. detailed extraction and analysis of complex spectrotemporal features); and machine learning/clustering analyses of stimuli or response features.
• Reporting: data presentation/visualisation, interpretation, reproducibility and open-science adherence, developmental editing of written work (i.e. editing of texts with detailed feedback for continued self-development).
• General signal processing assistance: our team can provide support on a variety of signal processing tasks. While the focus is largely on digital audio signal processing, we can assist in some other generalised tasks on a case-by-case basis.
   

In addition to offering our own workshop programs, we can provide bespoke training for in-person, online, or hybrid workshops. If there are multiple people within a group who would benefit from developing their skills in any of the above areas with focus on a specific goal, please get in touch with us and we’ll see what can be organised!