Williams Hall is the on-campus home of the Department of Psychology, housing faculty and student offices, research labs, and classrooms. In addition, the department's off-campus Psychological Services Center, Child Study Center, and Virginia Tech Autism Clinic
provide the foundation for practicum and research training and offer direct clinical services to children, adults, and families.
Additional department resources include three state-of-the-art laboratories dedicated to undergraduate and graduate teaching and research. The psychophysiological laboratory includes computer workstations, EEG/Evoked Potential workstations (including Neuroscan, Coulbourn, and BioPAC equipment), visual acuity and tracking equipment, as well as extensive perception equipment. The psychophysiology laboratory also houses the department's STISIM Drive fully-interactive driving simulator.
The department also maintains a computer lab with 20 Dell Optiplex workstations for technology-assisted teaching and research with neurophysiological and cognitive experimental software, statistical analysis software, and data management programs. There is also a dedicated-research computer laboratory including 12 Dell Optiplex workstations with capabilities for running a variety of customized research software.
Several faculty are affiliated with the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC, which offers world-class facilities for behavioral research, the world's premier human functional magnetic resonance imaging facility, and large-scale computational clusters for modeling, simulations, and analyses of large-scale molecular, genomic, biophysical, behavioral, imaging, and population-based data.
The Institute also serves as the hub for a worldwide hyperscanning network for interactive, real-time functional brain imaging. Connecting the Institute's three research-dedicated magnetic resonance imaging scanners to multiple sites across the United States and throughout Europe and Asia, this network provides the world's first very-high-throughput functional brain imaging approach to the study of social cognition.
This work is enabling new insights not only into how the brains of healthy children and adults make decisions, but also how traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress disorder, and a range of neuropsychiatric disorders affect critical decision-making processes.
