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

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 activation while performance variables in psychological tests measures behavioral outputs of mental functions. Mental functions are synonym of cognitive process, which include attention, working memory, emotion etc. It is important to hasten the underlying cognitive processes through cognitive enhancement for improving human performance. To determine level of enhancement, it is obligatory to exploit psychophysiological method for precise measurement.In the present research work, non-invasive methods i.e. meditation technique and video gaming were separately used to enhance the cognitive abilities of human subjects. Separate research experiments have included human subjects with different age groups. Most of the studies were conducted in pre- post- training fashion and assessment of stress tolerance capacity, mental workload, working memory and psychomotor functions was done by standard test/tools. For assessment of emotion regulation capacity, select videos were used and later on support vector machine classifiers utilized for emotion classification. Frontal Brain Asymmetry for alpha band power was extracted on frontal EEG channels for different emotions and used for emotion recognition. With regular playing of action video games, psychomotor function, visual memory, and visual acuity were enhanced.