Psychophysiological assessment of human cognition and its enhancement by a non-invasive method

By Sushil Chandra

Psychophysiological evaluation is a means to analyze underlying cognitive 

processes of human brain. This includes interpretation of the psychological test 

performance as well as correct estimation of acquired physiological signals. 

Acquired physiological signals are indices of direct or indirect neural activat

• Language: English
• Publisher: amirparacha
• Release date: Jan 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9781805455134

Book preview

PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT OF HUMAN

COGNITION AND ITS ENHANCEMENT BY

NON-INVASIVE METHODS

SUSHIL CHANDRA

ii

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 2

BACKGROUND AND LITERATURE SURVEY

CHAPTER 3

PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT OF COGNITIVE

WORKLOAD

CHAPTER 4

A NEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE TO WORKLOAD

REGULATION THROUGH SUDARSHAN KRIYA YOGA (SKY)

CHAPTER 5

EFFECT OF SUDARSHAN KRIYA (MEDITATION) ON GAMMA, ALPHA, AND THETA RHYTHM DURING WORKING MEMORY

TASK

CHAPTER 6

SUDARSHAN KRIYA YOGA AS NON-INVASIVE METHOD FOR

MENTAL STRESS REGULATION

CHAPTER 7

EMOTION REGULATION BY SUDARSHAN KRIYA YOGA AND

FRONTAL BRAIN ASYMMETRY AS THE RECOGNITION INDEX

CHAPTER 8

VIDEO GAMING AS COGNITIVE ENHANCER

iii

Image 1

CHAPTER-1

INTRODUCTION

Humans, since long, made efforts to improve their life condition in many different ways. Historically, these include creating basic tools, harnessing external forces and systems and making changes to the environment through their ability to manipulate the material world. However, a movement has emerged in the 21st century, which sees such changes to humanity as not only desirable but also essential. That is a vision for the transformation of humanity through technology. ‘Human enhancement’ has been used in different ways, and can be seen in changed human conditions through agriculture, nutrition, energy, engineering, mobility, education, military, counseling and therapy, and so on. Evaluation of cognition and its indices has been a matter of investigation and development of different tools. Still very few researchers were focused on coordination of psychological and physiological data.

IMPORTANCE OF COGNITION IN HUMAN LIFE

Cognition indeed refers to the mental process by which external or internal input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. Augmenting cognitive abilities is a major concern in the field where human performance matters. In the era of increased technological interventions, it is expected to reduce task completion duration with faster reaction time. With machine intelligence, humans are required to be sufficiently intelligent to take a command over machines.

In many sectors such as sports, trading, and military quick decisions determine the success rate of the task in hand. The whole process of perceiving and translating external stimuli from the field has to be very precise to prevent errors and of hitting the target with surety.

Neural connections for muscles and their regulatory mechanisms must be strong enough to lead for maximum performance. Balance, proprioception, and cognition are all aspects of the brain's ability to perform at this high level whilst sitting on the shoulder of Speed, Power and Endurance. Athletes must be able to make split-second decisions under the pressures of activity or competition. Quite often this 1

vital skill is left to chance, relying on the skill of the sportsman or athlete. Cognition in sport is very important because if athlete cannot READ the game, ANTICIPATE

what will happen and REACT to stimulus, then his effectiveness is drastically reduced Clegg M. (2015).

In the context of armed forces, it is important to have ready-to-act perceptive abilities, for effective vigilance and situational awareness. Identification of threats and suspects during day and night operations is a big challenge for military personnel. With physical stressors like extreme humidity, heat or freezing cold affect the cognitive abilities to stay at even the default state of mind. Soldiers in combat forces are enormously prone to get exposed to emotional and mental trauma; strategies to enhance their psychological resilience are needed, especially with meditation and another cognitive training programs. Multimodal as compared to single modality treatments have emerged as an important option in the management of stress disorders and perseverance of cognitive state of soldiers.

Multi-modal training programs should be incorporated in military training.

In the field of trading and management of financial corporations, it is again indispensable to peep into brain circuits whilst taking economic decisions. The emerging field of neuroeconomics deals with influences of heuristics and biases during decision-making. Multi-disciplinary researchers are also revealing answers for some of the key questions: How should investors deal with financial risk, and how do they actually do it? Which brain system estimate uncertainty? What is the difference between those systems in people who make bad choices? These are complex but tractable questions, and scientists have made significant progress towards their solution. Neuromarketing deals with branding, product design, in-store marketing, and advertising. Among neuroscientists, the incorporation of economic concepts has generated much excitement. Economic models make assumptions about covert preferences, or value judgments because measuring actual preferences with only behavioral methods is difficult. Technological advancements in cognitive psychology and neuroscience have provided tools to measure those covert preferences. Assessment of brainwaves and brain activation pattern can answer this riddle of choices and preferences pattern. Application of assessment of brain activation patterns during these decisions can provide different 2

kinds of map such as effective map, heuristic map, and performance map. Risk taking ability in an individual can be enhanced with interventions aiming for cognitive enhancement. Applicability of any intervention can be decided only when cognitive state can be accurately measured.

PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT

Psychophysiological assessment is a method of examining the brain by studying its behavioral products in combination with the pattern of physiological signal, whereas the neuropsychological assessment involves the study of human behavior by means of interviews, standardized tests, and questionnaire that provide precise and sensitive indices of cognitive functioning. These are the means of measuring the most complex aspects of human behavior that include attention, perception, memory, building and drawing of speech and language, reasoning, problem-solving, judgment, planning, and emotional processing. Daniel Hibner (2008) has defined the method for the cognitive assessment as a subjective interpretation of current systemic approaches and selected cognitive processes as a basis for analysis of the cognitive state. Background research of cognitive psychology revealed how cognitive processes positively and negatively affect understanding. The identified cognitive processes that are frequently adopted for understanding cognitive state include the basis for assessing current approaches in various tasks performed by individuals of different professions. The cognitive functions are analoguous to the computer operations (Anderson J.R., 1987) and can be categorized into four classes, viz., input, storage, processing, and output. The receptive functions comprise the abilities to select, acquire, classify and integrate the information.

Memory and learning refer to information, while expressive functions are the meanings through which the information is communicated or acted upon. Each functional class comprises many discrete activities- such as shape/size recognition and memory recalling for cycling. Although each function constitutes a distinct class of behavior which is interdependent. Simple tests are conducted to study highly specific functions and the discrete responses from them are analyzed.

3

THE NEED OF PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT

The assessment of behavior is a challenging task because even the simplest behavior involves a chain of computations, which link perception, decision-making, and action. One of the major sources of information regarding measurement of organization of these stages is response time (RT). Recently, RTs have been combined with neuroimaging data to identify separate processing modules (Sternberg S., 2001, 2004). However, even in very simple tasks, RTs, typically, vary over a broad range of several hundred milliseconds. Another property is that RT can slow down considerably under some circumstances in which the subject is distracted by another competing stimulus or task. Inference may therefore be drawn that there are certain stages that act as a bottleneck and can only operate serially, i.e. one at a time. When two tasks are presented simultaneously (or sequentially at a short interval), a delay in the execution of the second task has been systematically observed. This interference effect is referred to as the psychological refractory period (PRP) and has been explained by a model (Sigman & Dehaene., 2005) proposed by many cognitive scientists that involves three stages of processing: a perceptual component (P component), a central component (C

component), and a motor component (M component), in which only the C

component establishes a bottleneck.

Other researchers working in the field of psychological research have investigated how the decision to response is arrived. The decision-making process has been modeled as a noisy integrator that accumulates evidence provided by the sensory system (Sigman & Dehaene, 2005). Although many variants have been proposed, the basic idea is that perceptual evidence is stochastically accumulated in time.

Indeed, under many circumstances, such a decision mechanism can be optimal in the sense that it maximizes the overall likelihood of a correct classification of the stimuli. In the simplest scheme, all the variance in RT is attributed to this integration process. Thus, the integration model establishes a possible parsing of a task into components: a fixed component to transform the sensory information to an abstract variable, the accumulation of evidence itself (the only variable process), and the execution of the response.

4

TOOLS FOR PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT

Cognitive researchers have developed a host of tasks that can be divided into the general categories of either direct or indirect measures. Computer-based testing (CBT) plays an increasingly important role in assessment, and it is believed that it will revolutionize testing practices (e.g., Bennett, 1998). The use of computers offers several practical benefits; such as allowing examinees to schedule their own time