Ellen Seiss

• PhD
• Principal Academic at Bournemouth University

This study is the first to explore the usability of a commercial off the shelf (COTS) VR headset for people with macular degeneration (MD) in the context of visual search. Fourteen participants were recruited; 9 fully sighted and 5 with sight loss due to MD. Firstly, a visual grid search task was presented where participants were asked to identify...

Investigating emotions relies on pre-validated stimuli to evaluate induced responses through subjective self-ratings and physiological changes. The creation of precise affect models necessitates extensive datasets. While datasets related to pictures, words, and sounds are abundant, those associated with videos are comparatively scarce. To overcome...

This paper describes the development and validation of 3D Affective Virtual environments and Event Library (AVEL) for affect induction in Virtual Reality (VR) settings with an online survey; a cost-effective method for remote stimuli validation which has not been sufficiently explored. Three virtual office-replica environments were designed to indu...

Acute stroke patients performed well on tasks that require minimal executive function, as evidenced by baseline ceiling effects. Executive function deficits were indicated on complex tasks. Significant improvements were shown on two SIPP tasks, suggesting the SIPP can help to improve executive functioning. The SIPP appears to be a valuable and disc...

Virtual Reality (VR) enables the simulation of ecologically validated scenarios, which are ideal for studying behaviour in controllable conditions. Physiological measures captured in these studies provide a deeper insight into how an individual responds to a given scenario. However, the combination of the various biosensing devices presents several...

The functional equivalence (FE) hypothesis suggests motor imagery (MI) is comparable with the planning stages of action. A strong interpretation of this hypothesis suggests MI can prime subsequent actions in a way that should be indistinguishable from motor preparation (MP). Alternatively, MI could involve more richly informative motor plans than M...

Recent pandemic related events have effectively put a stop to most in-lab data collection which has a profound negative impact on many research fields. Online and remote data collection, without the need to travel to a laboratory, starts to be used as a valuable alternative in some scenarios. This approach does not only help to resume some research...

The functional equivalence (FE) hypothesis suggests motor imagery (MI) is comparable with the planning stages of action. A strong interpretation of this hypothesis suggests MI can prime subsequent actions in a way that should be indistinguishable from motor preparation (MP). Alternatively, MI could involve more richly informative motor plans than M...

Background: Despite the established evidence and theoretical advances explaining human judgments under uncertainty, developments of mobile health (mHealth) Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) have not explicitly applied the psychology of decision making to the study of user needs. We report on a user needs approach to develop a prototype of a...

Objective: Increased levels of dietary restraint are associated with deficits on many cognitive tasks. Less is known about how individual differences in restraint influences complex cognition such as reasoning which is the focus of this research. Design: Two experimental studies are reported. In study 1, participants (n = 158) completed a causal co...

Immersive technologies offer the potential to drive engagement and create exciting experiences. A better understanding of the emotional state of the user within immersive experiences can assist in healthcare interventions and the evaluation of entertainment technologies. This work describes a feasibility study to explore the effect of affective vid...

We developed an exploratory VR environment, where spatial features and narratives can be manipulated in real time by the facial and head gestures of the user. We are using the Faceteq prototype, exhibited in 2017, as the interactive interface. Faceteq consists of a wearable technology that can be adjusted on commercial HMDs for measuring facial exp...

Faceteq prototype v.05 is a wearable technology for measuring facial expressions and biometric responses for experimental studies in Virtual Reality. Developed by Emteq Ltd laboratory, Faceteq can enable new avenues for virtual reality research through combination of high performance patented dry sensor technologies, proprietary algorithms and real...

Objective: The goal conflict model of eating (Stroebe, Mensink, Aarts, Schut, & Kruglanski, 2008) proposes differences in eating behaviour result from peoples' experience of holding conflicting goals of eating enjoyment and weight maintenance. However, little is understood about the relationship between eating behaviour and the cognitive processes...

Sleepiness is common after stroke, but in contrast to its importance for rehabilitation, existing studies focus primarily on the acute state and often use subjective sleepiness measures only. We used quantitative electroencephalography (qEEG) to extract physiological sleepiness, as well as subjective reports, in response to motor-cognitive demand i...

One of the potential explanations for negative compatibility effects (NCE) in subliminal motor priming tasks has been perceptual prime-target interactions. Here, we investigate whether the characteristic tri-phasic LRP pattern associated with the NCE is caused by these prime-target interactions. We found that both the prime-related phase and the cr...

Modulations of blood glucose levels affect brain function. These effects are well described for hypoglycaemia, however much less is known about how variations of blood glucose levels within the normal range affect cognition, information processing and behaviour. A small body of empirical evidence suggests that elevated glucose levels, induced by gl...

Modulations of blood glucose concentration (BGC) in the normal range are known to facilitate performance in memory and other cognitive tasks but few studies have investigated the effects of BGC variations on complex sensorimotor task so far. The present study aimed to examine glucose effects with the Eriksen flanker task. This task was chosen becau...

The last-in first-out theory suggests that late-maturing brain regions are affected earlier in the life span than those maturing early. Maturation of the motor system and the frontal executive control system continues into early adulthood. Evidence further suggests that motor preparation, index by the contingent negative variation (CNV), matures re...

Previous studies suggest that oral glucose administration directly facilitates declarative memory encoding and retrieval (Sünram-Lea et al., 2002; Manning et al., 1992). However, glucose could indirectly facilitate memory encoding by already enhancing pre-mnemonic sensory or lexical/semantic processes, which produce important substrates for memory...

This pilot study explores the metabolic changes associated with persistent postconcussion syndrome (PCS) after mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI; >12 months after injury) using magnetic resonance spectroscopy. We hypothesized that those mTBI participants with PCS will have larger metabolic differences than those without. Data were collected from mT...

Chronic hemiplegia is a common long-term consequence of stroke, and subsequent motor recovery is often incomplete. Neurophysiological studies have focused on motor execution deficits in relatively high functioning patients. Much less is known about the influence exerted by processes related to motor preparation, particularly in patients with poor m...

Supplementary results for error rate data in the modified response priming paradigm. (DOC)

Supplementary error rate data for hemiparetic patients (black) in comparison to controls (grey). A. Too early error rate B. Too late error rate. VR: validly cued right hand; VL: validly cued left hand; NR: neutrally cued right hand; NL: neutrally cued left hand. Asterisks indicate significant differences using post-hoc independent t-tests (***p<0.0...

Dyslexic adults completed questionnaires designed to investigate relationships between cognitive functioning, especially executive aspects, and work success. The study was designed to determine whether quantitative support could be provided for the model of adult dyslexic success derived from the work of Gerber and his colleagues (Gerber, Ginsberg,...

Stroke patients with motor deficits often report daytime sleepiness. While slowing of the EEG during wakefulness has been shown after stroke, it is unknown if and how this is linked to their perception of sleepiness. Using waking EEG and a motor task (associated with mild sleepiness), we examined: 1) differences in the frequency composition and lat...

Movement preparation in patients with left hand hemiparesis (n = 26) was investigated using a response priming paradigm, and in addition compared to age-matched controls (n = 26). In this experiment, trials with valid, neutral and no response cues were presented 1300 ms before the imperative stimulus. Behavioral results showed validity effects for...

Behavioural studies suggest that elevated blood glucose concentrations accelerate response times in complex tasks (Owens and Benton, 2004, Neuropsychobiology). With the present study we aimed to explore the mechanisms subserving elevated blood glucose effects (7 mmol/litre versus fasting levels of 5 mmol/litre) by studying EEG-derived indices of se...

To investigate whether salient visual singletons capture attention when they appear outside the current endogenous attentional focus, we measured the N2pc component as a marker of attentional capture in a visual search task where target or nontarget singletons were presented at locations previously cued as task-relevant, or in the uncued irrelevant...

We used ERP measures to investigate how attentional filtering requirements affect preparatory attentional control and spatially selective visual processing. In a spatial cueing experiment, attentional filtering demands were manipulated by presenting task-relevant visual stimuli either in isolation (target-only task) or together with irrelevant adja...

This study explored the use of steady-state somatosensory evoked potentials (ssSEPs) as a continuous probe on the excitability of the somatosensory cortex during the foreperiod and the response time of a cued choice reaction time task. ssSEPs were elicited by electrical median nerve stimulation at the left and right wrist, using a stimulation frequ...

Lateralized ERP components triggered during cued shifts of spatial attention (anterior directing attention negativity [ADAN], late directing attention positivity [LDAP]) have been observed during visual, auditory, and tactile attention tasks, suggesting that these components reflect supramodal attentional control processes. This interpretation has...

Parkinson's disease patients have enhanced interference effects arising from the conflict between competing responses, as probed in various 'conflict tasks'. The possibility that this is due to an inhibitory deficit received recent support from a masked response priming task [Seiss, E., & Praamstra, P. (2004). The basal ganglia and inhibitory mecha...

Executive control processes are supposed to regulate behaviour and to resolve conflicts in information processing. Recently, Stürmer and colleagues (Stürmer et al., 2002; Stürmer & Leuthold, 2003) reported electrophysiological findings in a Simon task that indicated control over a location-based processing route that mediates response priming. Impo...

Some widely used tasks in cognitive neuroscience depend on the induction of a response conflict between choice alternatives, involving partial activation of the incorrect response before the correct response is emitted. Although such “conflict tasks” are often used to investigate frontal-lobe-based conflict-monitoring processes, it is not known how...

Subliminal response priming was used to investigate inhibitory control processes relevant to response selection impairments in Parkinson's disease. Using a backward masking technique, covert activation of left- or right-hand responses was induced without subjects consciously perceiving the stimuli (right- or left-pointing arrows). The masked primin...

Gaze direction is known to modulate the activation patterns of sensorimotor areas as seen at the single cell level and in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). To determine whether such gaze direction effects can be observed in scalp-recorded electroencephalogram (EEG) measures of sensorimotor function we investigated somatosensory evoked p...

In both Parkinson's disease and Huntington's disease, proprioceptive sensory deficits have been suggested to contribute to the motor manifestations of the disease. Here, proprioceptive sensory function was investigated in Parkinson's disease patients, Huntington's disease patients, and healthy control subjects (each group n=8), using proprioception...

Reafferentelectroencephalography (EEG) potentials evoked by active or passive movement are largely dependent on muscle spindle input, which projects to postrolandic sensory areas as well as the precentral motor cortex. The origin of these proprioception-related evoked potentials has previously been studied by using N20-P20 source locations of the m...

There is evidence from memory studies that context acquired in parallel with the encoded material will facilitate retrieval. However, relatively little is known of how context affects drug discrimination behaviour in humans. The present study employs conventional drug discrimination procedures to investigate the effects of music, as an external cue...