Experimental Neuropsychology - Science topic

Here's a nice paper on ways to measure oxytocin levels in humans: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-17674-7

Unfortunately, it doesn't appear as if you can image oxytocin using MRS (which has pretty poor spatial and temporal resolution anyway) or any other neuroimaging measures as far as I can tell.

I think you can safely write that research shows an overall gain with oral presentation for both students with and without disabilities. References you can quote on this are

1) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7275/ktkv-3279 Available at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/pare/vol14/iss1/18

2)

and especially this meta‐analysis of Research on the read aloud accommodation

Wishing you fun with your research, Mohammad

I also think the cognitive effects of binaural beats are interesting but the results are mixed so it is good if you are planning to do some study that could perhaps clarify the picture. Yes, both sides should be there if you increase the size parameter in the Plot frequency window. You could separate the stereo channels and do the analysis for each to make sure it is separated. https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/splitting_and_joining_stereo_tracks.html

Blind people have no visual imagery in their dreams, if born blind. Dreams do process past memories; in a dream, different temporal memory layers can be mixed over into 'one film'. We do not dream with our eyes, it is a brain function in sleep as the brain is a non-stop organ (you could put a light bulb on it).The existence of pre-cognitive dreams, which is portrayed in prophetic literature, e.g. Joseph in Egypt, cannot be ruled out. A healthy sleep cycle (chronobiology) and dreamimg are closely connected, in medical terms, to 'free' the memory from non-necessary psycho-logical ballast of life experiences.

To my knowledge, there is no so-called "gold standard" but there are "tried-and-tested" methods. A most popular approach has been the use of virtual environments (designed using game engines like Unreal and Unity) in the testing of older adults in computer labs (see Zhong & Moffat, Zhong,Magnusson, et al., 2016).

Alternatively, you can always resort to the traditional method of testing the spatial orientation ability of your participants in the real world through guided navigation of a previously unfamiliar environment and getting them to perform pointing-to-landmarks and distance estimation tasks (see Zhong, 2013; Zhong, 2016; Zhong & Kozhevnikov, 2016). 

Please refer to all the links below. I pray that you shall find these/my papers useful. You will find other studies of relevance in the reference pages of these papers.

KICA - Kimberley Indigenous Cognitive Assessment Tool and Cogstate ( Computer based) are good tools. KICA is mainly for above 45.

Try the Inhibition test from the NEPSY-2.  I find it very helpful.

good luck,

ray

I think that the main thing you need to focus on in this test is the number of correct responses from each ear. May be you really have some trials when your subject can give you a correct answer  for guesses. The best thing you can do to clean your data is to exclude from the sample those subjects who had a lot of incorrect answers (for example, more than two standard deviation). 

As Rob alludes to, the digit span task is designed to measure the maximum list length for which recall is accurate / correct. As such, serial position effects are not so meaningful, because by definition performance is at ceiling up to span (ok not completely true but as a first approximation this holds)

You can administer individually-titrated span or supra span list lengths and then you are likely to observe serial position curves, but at this point you are investigating serial recall, not span.

This is not a simple configuration environment for which to produce norms. For example, many researchers would anticipate different levels of serial recall accuracy depending on just how supra-span the list is, they might expect primacy or recency to vary with details such as presentation rate, and if you are using a digit span task, then there are constraints such as the size of the stimulus set (i.e. you only have 9 stimuli to play with, and they therefore repeat across trials). In other words, norms might be so study-specific or of such limited generalisability that they aren't really norms at all.

My expectation is that most studies, like those you cite, use control groups for exactly these reasons: to provide some meaningful reference point for the ageing data of interest.

I agree that size of the animal (and considering the answers above, also age of the animal, which particularly in rats has a major effect on their size) does have an influence. Within an experiment all animals should be tested in exactly the same conditions, including OF size. If one of your aims is to compare specific behavioral aspect in animals (e.g. rats of a specific strain) of different age (i.e. size) cage size again should not be different. So you see, it all depends on your question and protocol. Time of day of the test and lighting conditions and the adaptation to the animals to them has an often underestimated effect on behavior of rats and mice.

You can use a temporal discrimination operant task in rats (see link below).  You train the rats so that, for example, if a tone comes on for 2 seconds they press a certain lever for a reward, but if the tone comes on for 8 seconds they press the opposite lever for the reward.  Other operant tasks also have a time perception component to them.  For example, the DRL-72 task requires the rats to wait 72 seconds before pressing the lever for a reward.  You could also adapt this task to change the DRL requirement to different times based on different cues.  The delayed discounting task also has a time perception component to it, as the longer the time for the delayed reward is perceived, the less valued the delayed reward will be to the animal.

There is a long-standing concept of social facilitation, whereby people (and rats) perform simple tasks better in the presence of others. 

'Sorry, my approach is muscular, through relaxation (TREPOKS method), and non-specific in first phases.

But I'm interested by the topic, because is a clinical problem, usually detected by dentists.

Regards,

VhiK.

Can you tell us a little more about your experiment?  E.g., design, what you're manipulating, what components you are most interested in, etc.? 

Are you pressure injecting or iontophoretically injecting BDA?  If the former, what is the volume you are injecting?  It is possible that there will be tracer leakage out of the penetration and around the skull a little time post-surgery considering you are injecting a cortical, or superficial structure.   I have seen similar cases with 'autofluorescence' of pia mater only when I pressure inject FR and a number of AAVs.

Dear Adam, there is no evidence for somatic states directly influencing appraisal. The influence should be by means of brain systems. The problem is that functional anatomical hypotheses as the involvement of ventromedial PFC in appraisal do not distinguish between a brain system that instantiates the somatic feeling and a brain system that makes the cognitive appraisal. This kind of distinction is made in the attached paper that proposes that the neuronal network makes the cognitive job and the astroglial network instantiates feelings.

In some cases it can be a problem because the person who receives it will read the message with the "tone" according to his mood at the moment. He is not feeling well already, what if he reads the message with sarcasm, or as if the therapist were fighting with him? Another aspect of such messages is that people tend to use this message as an unrefutable message. On direct contacts we can question, agree with part of the message and  in written we tend to accept it without any questioning. So, it is a great and strong means of approaching a patient. The therapist has to be exteemely cautious. From far, a therapist does not speak to one's minds, he screams to people's minds and the message will not be printed on paper, but on stones. 

Hey Judy!  Don't you think it measures almost everything, that is why it has emerged as so sensitive to lesions anywhere in the brain? It demands attentional control, attentional switching, graphomotor control, associative learning, visuospatial processing, kinesthetic processing, and executive control/cognitive control...

Y

Yes it is a good point. So, I guess that it is important to observe the correlation matrix too check the dependence between variables, the neuropsychological tests and explanatory variables. Anyway, If you have some doubt you can put together in a stepwise process for check this collinearity.

I am really fan to do statistics with strong background in ideas more than by "numeric way", if you believe that to variables and the variable are independent it is better to do the statistics without it. If you are not sure it is better to check this kind of effects, it is possible that two variables are independent but when the variable appears become dependent. If you don't check it you can to have problems with the referee.

Of you now how to use R software you can run this code. And you understand that I mean. I put the results of R console, hence you can check the results (even if the program is not familiar for you)

Good luck and better research. Cheers

#################################################################

set.seed(10) # Fix seed for the random varibles

# Create variables

x1 <- rnorm(n = 100, mean = 100, sd = 5)

x2 <- rnorm(n = 100, mean = 1, sd = 0.5)

Error <- rnorm(n = 100, mean = 0, sd = 1)

y <- 2* x1 + x2 + 1 + Error

# Model with stepwise

mod <- Rcmdr::stepwise( lm(formula = y ~ x1 + x2))

summary(mod)

BIC(mod)

# Other models

summary(lm( y ~ x1))

BIC(lm( y ~ x1))

# X2 it is idenpendet

summary(lm( y ~ x2))

BIC(lm( y ~ x2))

# Correlation matrix

cor(cbind(y, x1, x2))

# Results

# > set.seed(10) # Fix seed for the random varibles

#

# > # Create variables

# > x1 <- rnorm(n = 100, mean = 100, sd = 5)

#

# > x2 <- rnorm(n = 100, mean = 1, sd = 0.5)

#

# > Error <- rnorm(n = 100, mean = 0, sd = 1)

#

# > y <- 2* x1 + x2 + 1 + Error

#

# > # Model with stepwise

# > mod <- Rcmdr::stepwise( lm(formula = y ~ x1 + x2))

#

# Direction: backward/forward forward/backward backward forward

# Criterion: BIC

#

# Start: AIC=5.47

# y ~ x1 + x2

#

# Df Sum of Sq RSS AIC

# <none> 92.0 5.47

# - x2 1 12.3 104.3 13.44

# - x1 1 8740.5 8832.5 457.31

#

# > summary(mod)

#

# Call:

# lm(formula = y ~ x1 + x2)

#

# Residuals:

# Min 1Q Median 3Q Max

# -2.65155 -0.56638 0.07495 0.65964 2.35925

#

# Coefficients:

# Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)

# (Intercept) 1.29398 2.09137 0.619 0.537547

# x1 1.99993 0.02083 96.000 < 2e-16 ***

# x2 0.72901 0.20226 3.604 0.000496 ***

# ---

# Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

#

# Residual standard error: 0.9739 on 97 degrees of freedom

# Multiple R-squared: 0.9896, Adjusted R-squared: 0.9894

# F-statistic: 4610 on 2 and 97 DF, p-value: < 2.2e-16

#

#

# > BIC(mod)

# [1] 293.8658

#

# > # Other models

# > summary(lm( y ~ x1))

#

# Call:

# lm(formula = y ~ x1)

#

# Residuals:

# Min 1Q Median 3Q Max

# -3.1596 -0.6223 0.1859 0.7493 2.6301

#

# Coefficients:

# Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)

# (Intercept) 2.42117 2.19071 1.105 0.272

# x1 1.99557 0.02203 90.571 <2e-16 ***

# ---

# Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

#

# Residual standard error: 1.032 on 98 degrees of freedom

# Multiple R-squared: 0.9882, Adjusted R-squared: 0.9881

# F-statistic: 8203 on 1 and 98 DF, p-value: < 2.2e-16

#

#

# > BIC(lm( y ~ x1))

# [1] 301.8295

#

# > # X2 it is idenpendet

# > summary(lm( y ~ x2))

#

# Call:

# lm(formula = y ~ x2)

#

# Residuals:

# Min 1Q Median 3Q Max

# -20.9307 -6.9010 -0.0086 6.8308 23.5475

#

# Coefficients:

# Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)

# (Intercept) 200.9947 2.1016 95.641 <2e-16 ***

# x2 -0.3978 1.9684 -0.202 0.84

# ---

# Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

#

# Residual standard error: 9.494 on 98 degrees of freedom

# Multiple R-squared: 0.0004167, Adjusted R-squared: -0.009783

# F-statistic: 0.04085 on 1 and 98 DF, p-value: 0.8402

#

#

# > BIC(lm( y ~ x2))

# [1] 745.7054

#

# > # Correlation matrix

# > cor(cbind(y, x1, x2))

# y x1 x2

# y 1.00000000 0.99407964 -0.02041253

# x1 0.99407964 1.00000000 -0.05803451

# x2 -0.02041253 -0.05803451 1.00000000

Hello! Changes in skin conductance level are often estimated based on area under the curve or PP interval. This chapter might be useful: http://www.imd.inder.cu/adjuntos/article/487/Methods%20in%20Mind.pdf#page=116.

For the past ~30 years, two rather fundamentally incompatible theories of cognition have existed side-by-side despite thousands of experimental results from fields as diverse as linguistics and systems neuroscience using everything from functional neuroimaging to analyses of classical languages. The problem isn't so much a matter of complexity. It's the vast amount of contradictory literature that, for your question, means the answer to "who is qualified to use what methods to determine whether x individual is capable of y set of cognitive functions?" depends fundamentally on who you ask. Ask Lakoff, Chao, Gibbs, Pulvermüller, etc. and you will be told that the higher cognitive function is domain-general, embodied, and intricately linked to culture, language, etc. Ask Chomsky, Pinker, Caramazza, Foder, etc., and you will be told that higher cognitive processes are domain-specific, that the mind is functionally massively modular, that it is a symbol processing machine, etc. Something as fundamental as severe brain damage that results in aphasia or similar cognitive deficits is interpreted fundamentally differently by perhaps half of those in the cognitive sciences. That's just the issue of how the mind works and what the foundations of decision-making processes are (and how they can go wrong or be improved); go into clinical issues and you are faced with fundamental disagreements over what clinical issues actually are, let alone how they relate to the divides over the nature of the basis for cognitive functions. Add to this the desire to communicate a non-existent collective body of research to political, legal, and non-profit organizations involved in mental health, institutional commitment, etc., and you are essentially taking on the question "if there were an agreement within the cognitive sciences over the nature of cognition and higher cognitive functions, then if this were translatable into a non-existent body of clinical literature sufficiently explanatory and empirically based, then how could these non-existent frameworks be combined to inform policy and policy makers who are not scientists nor equipped to evaluate scientific literature?

Alternatively, you could set your sights a bit lower. For example, it doesn't really matter if seeing one's recently departed loved one's is a cultural phenomenon that is therefore normal in one context but not another or if it is necessarily indicative of either mental disorders or poor decision making/judgment capabilities. Where it is a normative reaction nobody is going to admit someone for such behavior, and where it is aberrant the extent to which cognition is culturally-based or embodied and/or to which disorders fit the biomedical model are mostly irrelevant- such behaviors are then by definition indicative of an inability to function within society. Likewise, it doesn't matter if something as severe as multiple personality disorder/dissociative personality disorder fits a sociocognitive model or a biomedical model- being unable to remember large portions of your life because you have more than one "alter" that for all intents and purposes means you act like fundamentally different people at different times means you are incapable (again) of normative behavior, risk assessment, etc. In other words, you don't need to understand the brain so much to get to the heart of the issue. The real issue is not whether there is some scientifically valid diagnostic criteria for whether someone has a disorder that interferes with their social, cognitive, emotional, or other brain functions to such an extent that warrants removing certain rights they have over their own person. It's whether or not a person can function in the society in which they live. Like mental disorders in general, this is not a matter of criteria based upon neuronal models, neurophysiological dynamics, or even neurocognitive measures per se, but rather the much simpler question "given that we know how most people behave, and given that X individual does not conform to this pattern, are they therefore a danger to themselves and/or others? Someone who believes that the moon landing was faked, dinosaur bones were planted as part of a conspiracy, the Knights Templar hid information about Jesus' descendants, and similar theories, but who goes to work every day, pays the bills, perhaps has a stable relationship, and is neither prone to violent outbursts nor in general known to be more than "odd" by acquaintances shouldn't be committed. It could be that there are all kinds of interesting reasons underlying such a worldview, and indeed there is extensive literature on this kind of question. It's irrelevant, however. Likewise, someone habitually runs into trouble, with the law, is prone to violent outbursts, has justified harming others for trivial reasons, etc., could have be suffering from neurological damage (this goes back all the way to Phineas Gage) or from some psychiatric condition and it couldn't matter less (for treatment, it absolutely matters, but not for any evaluation of whether the individual should have the rights over their own person limited or autonomy denied).

I think you might be looking in the wrong place for the answers. Not that I don't understand the desire to take on ambitious projects, mind you, it's just that unless you personally solve fundamental divides in two sets of fields (the cognitive sciences and clinical/psychiatric sciences), you won't really have a place to start. If you do happen to solve such problems, don't tell anybody just email me the results so that I can take all the credit. :)

I'm agree with Gedeon about anesthesia. We are registering resting EEG asking children to play with us, for example like we are austronauts and we are in a dark cosmos that's why we need to close eyes and not to move before we reach our station. It takes a lot of time to make a child feel free, not everyone wants to play,etc. Better to meet 2 times and more. It is painstaking way, but if you manage to do it you feel happy, belive me. Play with a child and ask mother to help you.