Extensions of Systematic Cognitive Experiments

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Maebashi Institute of Technology, Doctor Dissertation of Engineering

Yang Yang: A Brain Informatics-Based Study on Human Cognition, Emotion, and Their Relationship

underlying a certain aspect of human thinking, another goal of the main experiment is to explore the ―realm‖ of a research topic, for instance, to confirm the feasibility of the research plan, verify the validity of experimental materials, ascertain the minimum but allowable size of subject population, search for promising ideas to implement following experiments, and so forth. In order to support the results of main experiment, simple but solid parallel experiments that concentrate only on a unilateral feature of the main design can be performed. Between the main and parallel experiments, supplementary experiments are helpful to expand the range of the studies and test hypotheses summarized from former experiments. Moreover, deeper experiments should be effective to the investigation of a certain subtle processing that is noticed during the implementation of systematic studies (e.g., functional double-dissociation within a tiny region of the brain). When unscrambling the relationship between the main experiment and multiple parallel experiments, it is likely to think out new design which can be called inspired experiment. Hereby, a coarse frame of a BI-based data set has been established. The systematization makes it easy to find the absent experiments that are important but have not yet been carried out.

The aforementioned method is the principle for the design and practice of the thinking-centric experiments which facilitate the construction of BI brain big datacenter.

The overall design of experiments within this thesis followed this principle (see Figure 7.1). At first, a paradigm involving fearful (aversive) picture and arithmetic problems was designed as a main experiment, with the original intention to study how the negative emotion disturbs mental calculation. After that, in order to elaborate the detailed processes of mental calculation and emotional responses, the experiments of arithmetic solving and fearful picture viewing were employed as parallel designs, respectively, to advance the research plan. Later, another use of the main experiment

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occurred to us, in which the arithmetic can be utilized as the distractor to modulate the negative emotion. Under this structure, the integration of fearful pictures and numerical reasoning, as well as integration of fearful pictures and Sudoku can be further researched as supplementary or deeper topics.

Fig. 7.1: Extensions of systematic cognitive experiments. The BI methodology advocates a systematic design of cognitive experiments to direct the top-down investigations on the human brain, by implementing main experiment, parallel experiment, supplementary experiment, deeper experiment, and inspired experiment.

We have only finished the main parts of this framework. For the collected data, extensions by carrying out supplementary or deeper experiments in the future will make them perfect:

 We analyzed the data of simple addition and subtraction calculations, and concluded that addition calculation is likely to recruit an alterable hybrid

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Maebashi Institute of Technology, Doctor Dissertation of Engineering

Yang Yang: A Brain Informatics-Based Study on Human Cognition, Emotion, and Their Relationship

strategy that can switch to the ―subtraction mode‖ when dealing with difficult problems given the feasible neural basis. This result is consistent with the dual-pathway model proposed by Klein and colleagues which suggests a dynamic shift of neural circuits mediated by difficulty levels of the confronted addition problems (Klein et al., 2013). However, in order to verify this theory, only the 2-digit simple arithmetic problems without carrying and borrowing, as the ones adopted in this thesis, is not enough. In our future work, we plan to examine the neural substrates and their possible variations when the brain copes with different arithmetic problems, e.g., 1-digit simple problems without carrying and borrowing, 2-digit hard problems with carrying and borrowing, etc.

We will also compare different types of calculations, such as concern on the differences between mental calculation and written calculation, as well as the distinctions between not only addition and subtraction, but also the multiplication and division.

 With respect to the emotion response and regulation, we only focused on the aversive emotion in the current thesis. Neuroimaging data are widely used to provide evidence for a specialization or fractionation of psychological function (Gray et al., 2002). Emotions are also discrete, measurable, and physiologically distinct (Ekman, 1992). Each emotion has unique features: signal, physiology, and antecedent events, as well as characteristics in common with other emotions:

rapid onset, short duration, unbidden occurrence, automatic appraisal, and coherence among responses. Thus, couplings between different cognition and emotion types will generate varied neural phenomena that are worth studying.

In the future, experiments will also be implemented on both positive and

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negative emotions, such as happiness, contentment, excitement, embarrassment, guilt, sadness, etc. In addition, other alternative paradigms can be chosen to investigate the emotion regulation, such as selective inattention to emotional stimuli (Anderson et al., 2003), anticipation-driven emotion (Hsieh et al., 1999), and top-down reappraisal (Ochsner et al., 2002).

 The spectrum concept of mood disorders consists of the components of depression and mania, alone or in combination, on a continuum (Angst et al., 2015). One of the biggest challenges for the psychiatrists and psychologists is to find the biomarkers for telling bipolar and unipolar disorders (i.e., MDD) apart.

Accurate diagnosis of bipolar disorder is difficult in clinical practice because onset is most commonly a depressive episode and looks similar to unipolar depression. In the next stage, we plan to compare MDD and bipolar patients based on the results disclosed in this thesis, and try to make it clear how bipolar patients differentiate from MDD patients at the neural level.