Welcome to the Pieces of Mind Lab! As part of your role as a researcher, you are responsible for adhering to the regulations around human subjects research. To understand these regulations, you will need to go through several kinds of training. All lab members who engage in human subjects research – either collecting or analyzing data in lab – need to complete the following trainings. This includes undergrad research assistants, graduate students, postdocs, and any other collaborators – i.e. everyone! Once you have completed the training below, Dr. Lescroart or a senior lab member will review the relevant IRB-approved experimental protocols with you. We have two separate active protocols in lab. One is for neuroimaging and behavioral (psychophysics) experiments, and the other is for collection and analysis of mobile eye tracking data.
CITI training for human subjects research
- Create a free account on CITI, here: https://about.citiprogram.org/
- Make sure you set your organization affiliation to University of Nevada Reno. If you already have a CITI account from another institution, you can use that account and add an affiliation to UN Reno.
- You should see a menu with Institutional Courses; click “View Courses” next to University of Nevada Reno. Click on “ Group 1 Social Behavioral Research Investigators and Key Personnel Group.” to complete human subjects training.
CITI training for Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR)
- Create or update your CITI account as described above. Under UN Reno’s institutional courses, click “Biomedical Responsible Conduct of Research”
CITI training for Conflict of Interest
- Create or update your CITI account as decribed above. Under UN Reno’s institutional courses, click “Conflict of Interest”
Creating an IRBNet account
Once you have completed the trainings above, a research team member will add you to the lab relevant IRB protocol(s) with an amendment to our current protocols. To facilitate this process, it will be helpful for you to create a user account on www.irbnet.org . This is the website we use to manage our IRB documentation, and creation of an account there is also free. Please upload the pdfs that are generated at the end of each of the trainings above to your own account (we have found that this is the best way to manage training documentation). Please also send a copy of each training completion PDF to Mark, so he can keep independent track of who has done what.
Data collection (running experimental participants)
All participants in experiments, including members of the lab, must have documented informed consent prior to participating in any research activities (including pilot testing of experimental protocols!). Thus, please familiarize yourself with the experimental protocols (links to the protocol are available in the lab wiki, and all consent forms are available on this page at the links above). Before running yourself or anyone else in any data collection (including pilot data collection), make sure that you or the person you are running has been appropriately consented. Please see the checklist linked below and consult with Dr. Lescroart and/or other senior lab members about appropriate consent procedures (it is not as simple as signing the consent form). There are different consent forms for different experiments in lab, with separate forms for behavioral, mobile eye tracking, and neuroimaging experiments. Each type of unsigned consent form is stored in a separate labeled folder in the unlocked drawers of our consent form file cabinet in lab.
Briefly, the requirements for properly obtaining consent are:
- Participants must be recruited through approved means. Consult the protocol in question for approved recruitment methods.
- Consent procedures, culminating in signing the consent form by the participant and experimenter, must take place before participants do any experimental activities.
- Consent procedures should be performed in a place where the participant has privacy to ask questions out of hearing of other people.
- Participants must have sufficient time to read the consent form (not rushed just before participation) and to ask questions about the consent form, and a member of the research team must answer any questions they have before they sign the form.
- Consent forms should be signed and dated by the participant and the experimenter and stored in the appropriate locked file in lab.
- Participants should be given a copy of their signed consent form.
- Consent forms with a recent approval date stamp (within the last year) should always be used.
- Each participant should be documented on the appropriate lab experimental participants google doc (which only team members on the IRB have access to). A detailed checklist for obtaining informed consent is available here.