Reliability of web-based affective auditory stimulus presentation.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Seow TXF
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8266297 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Substantial recent research has examined the accuracy of presentation durations and response time measurements for visually presented stimuli in Web-based experiments, with a general conclusion that accuracy is acceptable for most kinds of experiments. However, many areas of behavioral research use auditory stimuli instead of, or in addition to, visual stimuli. Much less is known about auditory accuracy using standard Web-based testing procedures. We used a millisecond-accurate Black Box Toolkit to measure the actual durations of auditory stimuli and the synchronization of auditory and visual presentation onsets. We examined the distribution of timings for 100 presentations of auditory and visual stimuli across two computers with difference specs, three commonly used browsers, and code written in either Adobe Flash or JavaScript. We also examined different coding options for attempting to synchronize the auditory and visual onsets. Overall, we found that auditory durations were very consistent, but that the lags between visual and auditory onsets varied substantially across browsers and computer systems.
| S-EPMC5003904 | biostudies-other
Project description:BackgroundHumans are able to extract regularities from complex auditory scenes in order to form perceptually meaningful elements. It has been shown previously that this process depends critically on both the temporal integration of the sensory input over time and the degree of frequency separation between concurrent sound sources. Our goal was to examine the relationship between these two aspects by means of magnetoencephalography (MEG). To achieve this aim, we combined time-frequency analysis on a sensor space level with source analysis. Our paradigm consisted of asymmetric ABA-tone triplets wherein the B-tones were presented temporally closer to the first A-tones, providing different tempi within the same sequence. Participants attended to the slowest B-rhythm whilst the frequency separation between tones was manipulated (0-, 2-, 4- and 10-semitones).ResultsThe results revealed that the asymmetric ABA-triplets spontaneously elicited periodic-sustained responses corresponding to the temporal distribution of the A-B and B-A tone intervals in all conditions. Moreover, when attending to the B-tones, the neural representations of the A- and B-streams were both detectable in the scenarios which allow perceptual streaming (2-, 4- and 10-semitones). Alongside this, the steady-state responses tuned to the presentation of the B-tones enhanced significantly with increase of the frequency separation between tones. However, the strength of the B-tones related steady-state responses dominated the strength of the A-tones responses in the 10-semitones condition. Conversely, the representation of the A-tones dominated the B-tones in the cases of 2- and 4-semitones conditions, in which a greater effort was required for completing the task. Additionally, the P1 evoked fields' component following the B-tones increased in magnitude with the increase of inter-tonal frequency difference.ConclusionsThe enhancement of the evoked fields in the source space, along with the B-tones related activity of the time-frequency results, likely reflect the selective enhancement of the attended B-stream. The results also suggested a dissimilar efficiency of the temporal integration of separate streams depending on the degree of frequency separation between the sounds. Overall, the present findings suggest that the neural effects of auditory streaming could be directly captured in the time-frequency spectrum at the sensor-space level.
| S-EPMC3853018 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Psychophysical experiments conducted remotely over the internet permit data collection from large numbers of participants but sacrifice control over sound presentation and therefore are not widely employed in hearing research. To help standardize online sound presentation, we introduce a brief psychophysical test for determining whether online experiment participants are wearing headphones. Listeners judge which of three pure tones is quietest, with one of the tones presented 180° out of phase across the stereo channels. This task is intended to be easy over headphones but difficult over loudspeakers due to phase-cancellation. We validated the test in the lab by testing listeners known to be wearing headphones or listening over loudspeakers. The screening test was effective and efficient, discriminating between the two modes of listening with a small number of trials. When run online, a bimodal distribution of scores was obtained, suggesting that some participants performed the task over loudspeakers despite instructions to use headphones. The ability to detect and screen out these participants mitigates concerns over sound quality for online experiments, a first step toward opening auditory perceptual research to the possibilities afforded by crowdsourcing.
| S-EPMC5693749 | biostudies-literature
Project description:A brain-computer interface (BCI) translates brain signals into commands for the control of devices and for communication. BCIs enable persons with disabilities to communicate externally. Positive and negative affective sounds have been introduced to P300-based BCIs; however, how the degree of valence (e.g., very positive or positive) influences the BCI has not been investigated. To further examine the influence of affective sounds in P300-based BCIs, we applied sounds with five degrees of valence to the P300-based BCI. The sound valence ranged from very negative to very positive, as determined by Scheffe's method. The effect of sound valence on the BCI was evaluated by waveform analyses, followed by the evaluation of offline stimulus-wise classification accuracy. As a result, the late component of P300 showed significantly higher point-biserial correlation coefficients in response to very positive and very negative sounds than in response to the other sounds. The offline stimulus-wise classification accuracy was estimated from a region-of-interest. The analysis showed that the very negative sound achieved the highest accuracy and the very positive sound achieved the second highest accuracy, suggesting that the very positive sound and the very negative sound may be required to improve the accuracy.
| S-EPMC6390079 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Expectations, such as those arising from either learned rules or recent stimulus regularities, can bias subsequent auditory perception in diverse ways. However, it is not well understood if and how these diverse effects depend on the source of the expectations. Further, it is unknown whether different sources of bias use the same or different computational and physiological mechanisms. We examined how rule-based and stimulus-based expectations influenced behavior and pupil-linked arousal, a marker of certain forms of expectation-based processing, of human subjects performing an auditory frequency-discrimination task. Rule-based cues consistently biased choices and response times (RTs) toward the more-probable stimulus. In contrast, stimulus-based cues had a complex combination of effects, including choice and RT biases toward and away from the frequency of recently presented stimuli. These different behavioral patterns also had: 1) distinct computational signatures, including different modulations of key components of a novel form of a drift-diffusion decision model and 2) distinct physiological signatures, including substantial bias-dependent modulations of pupil size in response to rule-based but not stimulus-based cues. These results imply that different sources of expectations can modulate auditory processing via distinct mechanisms: one that uses arousal-linked, rule-based information and another that uses arousal-independent, stimulus-based information to bias the speed and accuracy of auditory perceptual decisions.
| S-EPMC9581427 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Faces are often used in psychological and neuroimaging research to assess perceptual and emotional processes. Most available stimulus sets, however, represent minimal diversity in both race and ethnicity, which may confound understanding of these processes in diverse/racially heterogeneous samples. Having a diverse stimulus set of faces and emotional expressions could mitigate these biases and may also be useful in research that specifically examines the effects of race and ethnicity on perceptual, emotional and social processes. The racially diverse affective expression (RADIATE) face stimulus set is designed to provide an open-access set of 1,721 facial expressions of Black, White, Hispanic and Asian adult models. Moreover, the diversity of this stimulus set reflects census data showing a change in demographics in the United States from a white majority to a nonwhite majority by 2020. Psychometric results are provided describing the initial validity and reliability of the stimuli based on judgments of the emotional expressions.
| S-EPMC6446554 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundResearch increasingly supports a transdiagnostic conceptualization of emotional disorders (ie applying the same underlying treatment principles across mental disorders, without tailoring the protocol to specific diagnoses), and many international researchers are currently investigating this issue.ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy and acceptability of a Web-based transdiagnostic program using a sample of Romanian adults diagnosed with anxiety and/or depression.MethodsVolunteer participants registered for the study and completed a series of online self-report measures. Participants who fulfilled basic inclusion criteria on these measures were contacted for a telephone diagnostic interview using the Structural Clinical Interview for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition Axis I Disorders (SCID-I). Enrolled participants were randomized to either the active treatment group (N=69) or the wait-list control group (N=36) using a 2:1 ratio. The transdiagnostic treatment was based on the Unified Protocol for Transdiagnostic Treatment of Emotional Disorders (UP; Barlow et al, 2011) that addresses common underlying mechanisms of anxiety and depression. Participants randomized to the active treatment condition received 10 weeks of Web-based treatment based on the UP. Throughout treatment, graduate students in clinical psychology provided guidance that consisted of asynchronous written communication on a secure Web platform. After the intervention, participants in both study conditions were invited to complete a set of self-report measures and a postintervention SCID-I interview conducted by a different team of graduate students blinded to participants' group and diagnostic status. Six months later, participants in the active treatment group were invited to complete an online follow-up assessment.ResultsDuring the intervention, active treatment participants completed on average 19 homework assignments (SD 12.10), and we collected data from 79.0% (83/105) at postintervention and 51% (35/69) at follow-up for self-report measures. Postintervention SCID-I interviews were collected from 77.1% (81/105) participants. Relative to the wait-list control group, the transdiagnostic intervention yielded overall medium to large effect sizes for the primary outcome measures (within-group Hedges g=0.52-1.34 and between-group g=0.39-0.86), and also for anxiety sensitivity (g=0.80), symptom interference (g=0.48), and quality of life (g=0.38). Significant within-groups effects only were reported for the active treatment group on Panic Disorder Severity Scale-Self Report (PDSS-SR, g=0.58-0.65) and Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS, g=0.52-0.58).ConclusionsInsignificant between-group differences for the Y-BOCS and PDSS-SR could be explained by the small number of participants with the associated primary diagnostic (eg, only 3 participants with obsessive compulsive disorder) by the choice of outcome measure (PDSS-SR was not rated among the evidence-based measures) and by the fact that these disorders may be more difficult to treat. However, the overall results suggest that the transdiagnostic intervention tested in this study represents an effective treatment option that may prove easier to disseminate through the use of Web-based delivery systems.Trial registrationClinicalTrials.gov CT02739607; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/study/NCT02739607 (Archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6yY1VeYIZ).
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Project description:In recent years, the influence of alpha (7-13 Hz) phase on visual processing has received a lot of attention. Magneto-/encephalography (M/EEG) studies showed that alpha phase indexes visual excitability and task performance. Studies with transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) aim to modulate oscillations and causally impact task performance. Here, we applied right occipital tACS (O2 location) to assess the functional role of alpha phase in a series of experiments. We presented visual stimuli at different pre-determined, experimentally controlled, phases of the entraining tACS signal, hypothesizing that this should result in an oscillatory pattern of visual performance in specifically left hemifield detection tasks. In experiment 1, we applied 10 Hz tACS and used separate psychophysical staircases for six equidistant tACS-phase conditions, obtaining contrast thresholds for detection of visual gratings in left or right hemifield. In experiments 2 and 3, tACS was at EEG-based individual peak alpha frequency. In experiment 2, we measured detection rates for gratings with (pseudo-)fixed contrast. In experiment 3, participants detected brief luminance changes in a custom-built LED device, at eight equidistant alpha phases. In none of the experiments did the primary outcome measure over phase conditions consistently reflect a one-cycle sinusoid. However, post hoc analyses of reaction times (RT) suggested that tACS alpha phase did modulate RT for specifically left hemifield targets in both experiments 1 and 2 (not measured in experiment 3). This observation requires future confirmation, but is in line with the idea that alpha phase causally gates visual inputs through cortical excitability modulation.
| S-EPMC7317496 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Background: The immediate aftermath of traumatic events is a period of enhanced neural plasticity, following which some survivors remain with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) whereas others recover. Evidence points to impairments in emotional reactivity, emotion regulation, and broader executive functions as critically contributing to PTSD. Emerging evidence further suggests that the neural mechanisms underlying these functions remain plastic in adulthood and that targeted retraining of these systems may enhance their efficiency and could reduce the likelihood of developing PTSD. Administering targeted neurocognitive training shortly after trauma exposure is a daunting challenge. This work describes a study design addressing that challenge. The study evaluated the direct effects of cognitive remediation training on neurocognitive mechanisms that hypothetically underlay PTSD, and the indirect effect of this intervention on emerging PTSD symptoms. Method: We describe a study rationale, design, and methodological choices involving: (a) participants' enrolment; (b) implementation and management of a daily self-administered, web-based intervention; (c) reliable, timely screening and assessment of treatment of eligible survivors; and (d) defining control conditions and outcome measures. We outline the rationale of choices made regarding study sample, timing of intervention, measurements, monitoring participants' adherence, and ways to harmonize and retain interviewers' fidelity and mitigate eventual burnout by repeated contacts with recently traumatized survivors. Conclusion: Early web-based interventions targeting causative mechanisms of PTSD can be informed by the model presented in this paper.
| S-EPMC5844026 | biostudies-literature
Project description:We measured the responses of neurons in auditory cortex of male and female ferrets to artificial vowels of varying fundamental frequency (f(0)), or periodicity, and compared these with the performance of animals trained to discriminate the periodicity of these sounds. Sensitivity to f(0) was found in all five auditory cortical fields examined, with most of those neurons exhibiting either low-pass or high-pass response functions. Only rarely was the stimulus dependence of individual neuron discharges sufficient to account for the discrimination performance of the ferrets. In contrast, when analyzed with a simple classifier, responses of small ensembles, comprising 3-61 simultaneously recorded neurons, often discriminated periodicity changes as well as the animals did. We examined four potential strategies for decoding ensemble responses: spike counts, relative first-spike latencies, a binary "spike or no-spike" code, and a spike-order code. All four codes represented stimulus periodicity effectively, and, surprisingly, the spike count and relative latency codes enabled an equally rapid readout, within 75 ms of stimulus onset. Thus, relative latency codes do not necessarily facilitate faster discrimination judgments. A joint spike count plus relative latency code was more informative than either code alone, indicating that the information captured by each measure was not wholly redundant. The responses of neural ensembles, but not of single neurons, reliably encoded f(0) changes even when stimulus intensity was varied randomly over a 20 dB range. Because trained animals can discriminate stimulus periodicity across different sound levels, this implies that ensemble codes are better suited to account for behavioral performance.
| S-EPMC2864913 | biostudies-literature