PEARL II: portable laboratory computer system for psychophysiological assessment using event related brain potentials

The PEARL II portable laboratory computer integrates hardware and software to serve as an on-line, realtime, experimental control and data acquisition system. Although the system can be used in many areas of research, PEARL II development has emphasized investigation of physiological responses from human subjects performing complex experimental tasks. PEARL functions as a "turn-key" system which performs standard neurological tests that would be employed, for example in neurotoxicological assessment. The PEARL system also includes several psychophysiological tests used in human engineering research on performance workload assessment. PEARL can also serve as a tool in basic research on human psychophysiology. The special feature of the PEARL test battery is its suitability for the measurements of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in these tasks, although other physiological indices such as heart rate may be monitored. In addition, the PEARL system includes a versatile library of laboratory control subroutines that can be used to develop new applications.