Rachel Hopman-Droste

Pearson Inc

Purpose: Today's children are increasingly inactive, with >50% not meeting the recommended 60 minutes of daily physical activity (PA). Recent reports suggest scores in reading and mathematics have also declined. Virtual reality (VR) is a technology that can be used to simulate real-world scenarios, like classroom learning. This study investigated...

Older adults are often underrepresented in clinical research, even though older adults are major consumers of novel therapies. We present major themes and recommendations from the 2021 ‘Inclusion of Older Adults in Clinical Research’ Workshop, convened by the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) Inclusion of Older Adults as a Model for S...

Exposure to environments that contain natural features can benefit mood, cognition, and physiological responses. Previous research proposed exposure to nature restores voluntary attention-attention that is directed towards a task through top down control. Voluntary attention is limited in capacity and depletes with use. Nature provides unique stimu...

The aim of the current study was to examine the association between cardiorespiratory fitness and electroencephalogram-based neural oscillations, using midfrontal theta, during an inhibitory control task in children. One-hundred seventy-one school-aged children (mean age = 8.9 ± 0.6 years; 46% girls) were recruited. Cardiorespiratory fitness was as...

According to Kaplan's Theory of Attention Restoration (ART), spending time in a natural environment can restore depleted cognitive resources. If this is true, then nature exposure may modulate the error-related negativity (ERN), a component of the event-related brain potential (ERP) that is related to cognitive control and attentional allocation. A...

Accumulating evidence suggests that exercise training is associated with improvements in brain health in older adults, yet the extant literature is insufficient in detailing why exercise training facilitates brain structure and function. Specifically, few studies have employed the FITT-VP principle (i.e., Frequency, Intensity, Time, Type, Volume, a...

The introduction of semi-automated driving systems is expected to mitigate the safety consequences of human error. Observational findings suggest that relinquishing control of vehicle operational control to assistance systems might diminish driver engagement in the driving task, by reducing levels of arousal. In this study, drivers drove a Tesla Mo...

Previous research shows that exposure to natural environments can decrease stress and improve performance on tasks measuring attention. We used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure changes in neural activity before, during, and after prolonged exposure to nature. We found midline frontal theta (4-8hz) activity significantly decreased after expos...

The goal of this research was to examine the impact of voice-based interactions using 3 different intelligent personal assistants (Apple’s Siri, Google’s Google Now for Android phones, and Microsoft’s Cortana) on the cognitive workload of the driver. In 2 experiments using an instrumented vehicle on suburban roadways, we measured the cognitive work...

This research examined the impact of in-vehicle information system (IVIS) interactions on the driver’s cognitive workload; 257 subjects participated in a weeklong evaluation of the IVIS interaction in one of ten different model-year 2015 automobiles. After an initial assessment of the cognitive workload associated with using the IVIS, participants...

Objective: The cognitive workload of three Smartphone Digital Assistants (SDA) was manipulated in an on-off manner while participants drove an instrumented vehicle in order to measure the costs associated with intermittent dual tasking. Background: Previous research has shown costs in productivity when switching between two discrete tasks; however,...