The HCP Aging study uses three customized PsychoPy task scripts in its functional MRI protocol. These scripts are now available for download and use by other researchers.
The VISMOTOR task is a simultaneous motor and visual activation paradigm. Participants view checkerboards on the screen and make motor responses (button presses) indicating which side of the checkerboard shows a change in color. This task is a block design with the potential option to analyze in an event related manner. It is intended to engage visual and motor networks.
This task is a classic Go/NoGo Task (named the “CARIT” task, as explained below), an inhibitory control task in which participants are instructed to press buttons for some shapes and withhold button responses to other shapes. It allows mapping of differential neural activity when response inhibition demands are high (NoGo trials) compared to freely responding with a motor action (Go trials). The NoGo > Go contrast identifies brain regions important for motor response inhibition. This particular Go/NoGo task contains two shapes that serve as NoGo stimuli (circle and square), and a variety of other shapes serve as Go stimuli.
In the HCP-D study, the CARIT task (Conditioned Approach Response Inhibition Task) integrates with the Guessing task which is run only in HCP-D. For the HCP-A project, the task is run without this association, but we continue to call it the CARIT task because the task itself is identical. See the HCP-D Task Protocols page for more details.
The FACENAME task is a paired-associates memory task. Participants are asked to encode the names of different face identities in some blocks and mentally recall them in other blocks. It is intended to engage encoding-related and retrieval-related neural processes. For a full description, see the documentation in the PsychoPy package download.
The FACENAME task was adapted from:
Zeineh, M. M., Engel, S. A., Thompson, P. M., & Bookheimer, S. Y. (2003). Dynamics of the hippocampus during encoding and retrieval of face-name pairs. Science, 299(5606), 577–580. doi: 10.1126/science.1077775
Download Task Protocols used in the HCP Aging study: