Psychophysiological Studies I. Performance and Physiological Response in Learning, Short-Term Memory and Discrimination Tasks

摘要

The report details the background, findings and conclusions of three studies completed in the Psychophysiology Laboratory of Baruch College, City University of New York, over the past twelve months. The first experiment was concerned with the effects of varied frequency of light stimulation upon verbal learning and a number of physiological responses, including: heart rate (HR), electromyogram (EMG), pulse wave velocity (PWV) and skin temperature (ST). The main findings were that HR was sensitive to task difficulty, while EMG was affected by frequency of light stimulation. Another finding was that lower baseline HR was related to better learning performance. The second study examined the effects of intensity of light stimulation on performance in a short term memory task (Sternberg paradigm) and a variety of physiological measures, including the event-related brain potential (ERP), HR, EMG, PWV, and ST. The major findings were that the endogenous component of the ERP (the P3 response) was delayed in latency with increased memory set size under the condition of no light stimulation. In the third study, we focused upon an examination of possible differences between the left and right hemispheres of the brain in processing verbal (words) versus spatial (areal size estimation) materials.