scholarly journals Experimentally-induced and real-world acute anxiety have no effect on goal-directed behaviour

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
CM Gillan ◽  
MM Vaghi ◽  
FH Hezemans ◽  
Grothe S van Ghesel ◽  
J Dafflon ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Anxiety Disorders ◽  
Healthy Volunteers ◽  
Real World ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Stressful Events ◽  
Panic Attacks ◽  
Healthy Individuals ◽  
Correlational Design ◽  
Acute Anxiety

AbstractCompulsivity is associated with failures in goal-directed control, an important cognitive faculty that protects against developing habits. But might this effect be explained by co-occurring anxiety? Previous studies have found goal-directed deficits in other anxiety disorders, and to some extent when healthy individuals are stressed, suggesting this is plausible. We carried out a causal test of this hypothesis in two experiments (between-subject N=88; within-subject N=50) that used the inhalation of hypercapnic gas (7.5% CO2) to induce an acute state of anxiety in healthy volunteers. In both experiments, we successfully induced anxiety, assessed physiologically and psychologically, but this did not affect goal-directed performance. In a third experiment (N=1413), we used a correlational design to test if real-life anxiety-provoking events (panic attacks, stressful events) impair goal-directed control. While small effects were observed, none survived controlling for individual differences in compulsivity. These data suggest that anxiety has no meaningful impact on goal-directed control.

scholarly journals Experimentally induced and real-world anxiety have no demonstrable effect on goal-directed behaviour

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. M. Gillan ◽  
M. M. Vaghi ◽  
F. H. Hezemans ◽  
S. van Ghesel Grothe ◽  
J. Dafflon ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
State Anxiety ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Stressful Events ◽  
Panic Attacks ◽  
Optimal Decision ◽  
Correlational Design ◽  
Psychiatric Conditions ◽  
Anxious State ◽  
Optimal Decision Making

Abstract Background Goal-directed control guides optimal decision-making and it is an important cognitive faculty that protects against developing habits. Previous studies have found some evidence of goal-directed deficits when healthy individuals are stressed, and in psychiatric conditions characterised by compulsive behaviours and anxiety. Here, we tested if goal-directed control is affected by state anxiety, which might explain the former results. Methods We carried out a causal test of this hypothesis in two experiments (between-subject N = 88; within-subject N = 50) that used the inhalation of hypercapnic gas (7.5% CO2) to induce an acute state of anxiety in healthy volunteers. In a third experiment (N = 1413), we used a correlational design to test if real-life anxiety-provoking events (panic attacks, stressful events) are associated with impaired goal-directed control. Results In the former two causal experiments, we induced a profoundly anxious state, both physiologically and psychologically, but this did not affect goal-directed performance. In the third, correlational, study, we found no evidence for an association between goal-directed control, panic attacks or stressful life eventsover and above variance accounted for by trait differences in compulsivity. Conclusions In sum, three complementary experiments found no evidence that anxiety impairs goal-directed control in human subjects.

scholarly journals Nociception testing during fixed-wing ambulance flights. An interventional pilot study on the effects of flight-related environmental changes on the nociception of healthy volunteers

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Prottengeier ◽  
Stefan Elsner ◽  
Andreas Wehrfritz ◽  
Andreas Moritz ◽  
Joachim Schmidt ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Healthy Volunteers ◽  
Environmental Changes ◽  
Sensory System ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Systemic Effects ◽  
Healthy Individuals ◽  
Sensory Testing ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Air Ambulance ◽  
Systematic Effects

AbstractBackgroundThe effects of environmental changes on the somato-sensory system during long-distance air ambulance flights need to be further investigated. Changes in nociceptive capacity are conceivable in light of previous studies performed under related environmental settings. We used standardized somato-sensory testing to investigate nociception in healthy volunteers during air-ambulance flights.MethodsTwenty-five healthy individuals were submitted to a test compilation analogous to the quantitative sensory testing battery – performed during actual air-ambulance flights. Measurements were paired around the major changes of external factors during take-off/climb and descent/landing. Bland-Altman-Plots were calculated to identify possible systemic effects.ResultsBland-Altman-analyses suggest that the thresholds of stimulus detection and pain as well as above-threshold pain along critical waypoints of travel are not subject to systemic effects but instead demonstrate random variations.ConclusionsWe provide a novel description of a real-life experimental setup and demonstrate the general feasibility of performing somato-sensory testing during ambulance flights. No systematic effects on the nociception of healthy individuals were apparent from our data. Our findings open up the possibility of future investigations into potential effects of ambulance flights on patients suffering acute or chronic pain.

scholarly journals Immersive virtual reality gameplay captures age differences in naturalistic prospective memory

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Saito ◽  
Nathan Rose
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Working Memory ◽  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Individual Differences ◽  
Prospective Memory ◽  
Age Differences ◽  
Real World ◽  
Ecological Validity ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Phone Calls

Age differences in prospective memory (PM)—memory for delayed intentions—have shown paradoxical patterns between laboratory and naturalistic settings. Virtual reality (VR) has been used to try and enhance the ecological validity of PM assessments, but methodological differences and limited validation have undermined interpretation of previous findings. We compared age differences between VR- and naturalistic-based measures of PM performance for younger (18-30 years) and older (56-83 years) adults (N = 111) to explore the role of task context and familiarity. Participants completed PM tasks embedded in the Job Simulator VR videogame and a Breakfast task that involved setting a table and simulating breakfast food preparation. We also included two real-world measures in which participants tried to remember to exchange personal belongings with the experimenter (Belongings task) and return phone calls at specific times outside the lab (Call-back task). We found comparable age deficits in Job Simulator and the Breakfast task. However, the age-PM paradox persisted in the Belongings and Call-back tasks. Hierarchical regression modeling was conducted to determine the roles of working memory, vigilance, and personality traits in each. Regression analyses revealed that significant variance in lab-based PM performance was accounted for by individual differences in working memory and agreeableness in older adults, while variance in naturalistic PM performance was accounted for by vigilance and neuroticism in young adults. This study suggests that immersive VR gameplay helped to provide ecologically valid PM assessment and advance a theoretical account of the age-PM paradox with a systematic, task-based analysis of age and individual differences in PM. Different mediators predicted young and older adults’ PM differently across real-world and in-lab contexts (despite measuring similar, naturalistic PM in the same individuals in both VR and in real life). There are methodological, cognitive, & personality moderators, but the “paradox” appears to be a real developmental phenomenon.

Neuropsychology in the Real World

2014 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 233-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Peper ◽  
Simone N. Loeffler
Keyword(s):  
Neuropsychological Assessment ◽  
Real World ◽  
Ecological Validity ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Emotional States ◽  
Context Sensitive ◽  
Traditional Assessment ◽  
Life Data ◽  
Real Life Data ◽  
Assessment And Treatment

Current ambulatory technologies are highly relevant for neuropsychological assessment and treatment as they provide a gateway to real life data. Ambulatory assessment of cognitive complaints, skills and emotional states in natural contexts provides information that has a greater ecological validity than traditional assessment approaches. This issue presents an overview of current technological and methodological innovations, opportunities, problems and limitations of these methods designed for the context-sensitive measurement of cognitive, emotional and behavioral function. The usefulness of selected ambulatory approaches is demonstrated and their relevance for an ecologically valid neuropsychology is highlighted.

scholarly journals Dealing with multiple experts and non-stationarity in inverse reinforcement learning: an application to real-life problems

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amarildo Likmeta ◽  
Alberto Maria Metelli ◽  
Giorgia Ramponi ◽  
Andrea Tirinzoni ◽  
Matteo Giuliani ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Reinforcement Learning ◽  
Real World ◽  
Real Life ◽  
User Preferences ◽  
Inverse Reinforcement Learning ◽  
Water Release ◽  
Reward Function ◽  
Model Free ◽  
Conflicting Objectives ◽  
Multiple Experts

AbstractIn real-world applications, inferring the intentions of expert agents (e.g., human operators) can be fundamental to understand how possibly conflicting objectives are managed, helping to interpret the demonstrated behavior. In this paper, we discuss how inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) can be employed to retrieve the reward function implicitly optimized by expert agents acting in real applications. Scaling IRL to real-world cases has proved challenging as typically only a fixed dataset of demonstrations is available and further interactions with the environment are not allowed. For this reason, we resort to a class of truly batch model-free IRL algorithms and we present three application scenarios: (1) the high-level decision-making problem in the highway driving scenario, and (2) inferring the user preferences in a social network (Twitter), and (3) the management of the water release in the Como Lake. For each of these scenarios, we provide formalization, experiments and a discussion to interpret the obtained results.

scholarly journals Perceptual insensitivity to the modulation of interoceptive signals in depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Smith ◽  
◽  
Justin S. Feinstein ◽  
Rayus Kuplicki ◽  
Katherine L. Forthman ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Substance Use ◽  
Individual Differences ◽  
Substance Use Disorders ◽  
Breath Hold ◽  
Healthy Individuals ◽  
Performance Improvements ◽  
Heartbeat Perception ◽  
Minimal Improvement ◽  
Healthy Participants

AbstractThis study employed a series of heartbeat perception tasks to assess the hypothesis that cardiac interoceptive processing in individuals with depression/anxiety (N = 221), and substance use disorders (N = 136) is less flexible than that of healthy individuals (N = 53) in the context of physiological perturbation. Cardiac interoception was assessed via heartbeat tapping when: (1) guessing was allowed; (2) guessing was not allowed; and (3) experiencing an interoceptive perturbation (inspiratory breath hold) expected to amplify cardiac sensation. Healthy participants showed performance improvements across the three conditions, whereas those with depression/anxiety and/or substance use disorder showed minimal improvement. Machine learning analyses suggested that individual differences in these improvements were negatively related to anxiety sensitivity, but explained relatively little variance in performance. These results reveal a perceptual insensitivity to the modulation of interoceptive signals that was evident across several common psychiatric disorders, suggesting that interoceptive deficits in the realm of psychopathology manifest most prominently during states of homeostatic perturbation.

scholarly journals Improving the performance of a radio-frequency localization system in adverse outdoor applications

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcelo N. de Sousa ◽  
Ricardo Sant’Ana ◽  
Rigel P. Fernandes ◽  
Julio Cesar Duarte ◽  
José A. Apolinário ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Random Forest ◽  
Ray Tracing ◽  
Real World ◽  
Practical Implication ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Simulated Data ◽  
Real Data ◽  
Gradient Boosting ◽  
Real World Data ◽  
Localization Accuracy

AbstractIn outdoor RF localization systems, particularly where line of sight can not be guaranteed or where multipath effects are severe, information about the terrain may improve the position estimate’s performance. Given the difficulties in obtaining real data, a ray-tracing fingerprint is a viable option. Nevertheless, although presenting good simulation results, the performance of systems trained with simulated features only suffer degradation when employed to process real-life data. This work intends to improve the localization accuracy when using ray-tracing fingerprints and a few field data obtained from an adverse environment where a large number of measurements is not an option. We employ a machine learning (ML) algorithm to explore the multipath information. We selected algorithms random forest and gradient boosting; both considered efficient tools in the literature. In a strict simulation scenario (simulated data for training, validating, and testing), we obtained the same good results found in the literature (error around 2 m). In a real-world system (simulated data for training, real data for validating and testing), both ML algorithms resulted in a mean positioning error around 100 ,m. We have also obtained experimental results for noisy (artificially added Gaussian noise) and mismatched (with a null subset of) features. From the simulations carried out in this work, our study revealed that enhancing the ML model with a few real-world data improves localization’s overall performance. From the machine ML algorithms employed herein, we also observed that, under noisy conditions, the random forest algorithm achieved a slightly better result than the gradient boosting algorithm. However, they achieved similar results in a mismatch experiment. This work’s practical implication is that multipath information, once rejected in old localization techniques, now represents a significant source of information whenever we have prior knowledge to train the ML algorithm.

scholarly journals An Adaptive Game-Based Learning Strategy for Children Road Safety Education and Practice in Virtual Space

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (11) ◽  
pp. 3661
Author(s):  
Noman Khan ◽  
Khan Muhammad ◽  
Tanveer Hussain ◽  
Mansoor Nasir ◽  
Muhammad Munsif ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Road Safety ◽  
Learning Strategy ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Safety Training ◽  
Virtual Space ◽  
Safety Education ◽  
Average Output ◽  
Training Environment ◽  
The Road

Virtual reality (VR) has been widely used as a tool to assist people by letting them learn and simulate situations that are too dangerous and risky to practice in real life, and one of these is road safety training for children. Traditional video- and presentation-based road safety training has average output results as it lacks physical practice and the involvement of children during training, without any practical testing examination to check the learned abilities of a child before their exposure to real-world environments. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a 3D realistic open-ended VR and Kinect sensor-based training setup using the Unity game engine, wherein children are educated and involved in road safety exercises. The proposed system applies the concepts of VR in a game-like setting to let the children learn about traffic rules and practice them in their homes without any risk of being exposed to the outside environment. Thus, with our interactive and immersive training environment, we aim to minimize road accidents involving children and contribute to the generic domain of healthcare. Furthermore, the proposed framework evaluates the overall performance of the students in a virtual environment (VE) to develop their road-awareness skills. To ensure safety, the proposed system has an extra examination layer for children’s abilities evaluation, whereby a child is considered fit for real-world practice in cases where they fulfil certain criteria by achieving set scores. To show the robustness and stability of the proposed system, we conduct four types of subjective activities by involving a group of ten students with average grades in their classes. The experimental results show the positive effect of the proposed system in improving the road crossing behavior of the children.

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