A STUDY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY AMONG HEALTHY MEDICAL STUDENTS USING A VIRTUAL MODEL TO INVESTIGATE ACUTE COGNITIVE STRESS EFFECTS
Abstract
Studies have shown that first-year medical students, experience psychological stress and, in some cases, mental illness due to new environments and stressful study regimes of the medical universities. An experimental study was conducted on first and next (2-3) year medical students of both genders. In the acute stress-recognized virtual model, participants were exposed to two increasing complexity visual tasks. Some derivative indices: correct answers in percent (CA%), reaction sustainability (RS), and functional ability level (FAL) were calculated based on the reaction time measures during simple and complex sensorimotor reactions (SSMRT, CSMRT). For statistical analysis ANOVA and Bonferroni correction t-test was used. No significant differences were found in mental activity between the two genders in 2-3 year medical students, except for CA% in the males' group during CSMRT which indicates that males concentrate well; There were significant differences in parameters of SSMRT (RS; CA%) and CSMRT (RS; FAL; CA%) between first-year males and females; Significant differences were found also in parameters of SSMRT (RS; CA%) and CSMRT (FAL; CA%) between first and next-year medical students in the females' group and no significant differences between first and next-year medical students in males group. Seems independent of gender, in 2-3 year medical students the sensorimotor and cognitive abilities are almost the same. The better mental performance parameters in the male group of first-year students can be explained only by the presence of certain stress in the female group, which can be related to the difficulty adapting to new environments and stressful learning regimes. In addition, male students are able to concentrate better compared to females on acute visual stress. Our results contribute to a better understanding of the psychophysiology of mental activity and further demonstrate how a virtual model can be used to investigate acute cognitive stress effects.
Article visualizations:
Keywords
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Audiffren M, Tomporowski P, Zagrodnik J, 2008. Acute aerobic exercise and information processing: energizing motor processes during a choice reaction time task. Acta Psychologica, 129(3): 410–419. doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2008.09.006
Bobrova N, 2015. The Rationale for the use of the complex of diagnostic methods for assessment of human’s psychophysiological state, Bulletin of NTUU "KPI" Informatics, management and computer engineering. Retrieved from https://ela.kpi.ua/bitstream/123456789/16717/1/8.pdf.pdf
Collardeau M, Brisswalter J, Vercruyssen F, Audiffren M, Goubault F, 2001. Single and choice reaction time during prolonged exercise in trained subjects: influence of carbohydrate availability. European Journal of Applied Physiology, 86(2): 150–156. doi:10.1007/s004210100513
Dagistani A, Hejaili F, Binsalih S, Al Jahdali H, Al Sayyari H, 2016. Stress in Medical Students in a Problem-Based Learning Curriculum. International Journal of Higher Education, 5(3). doi:10.5430/ijhe.v5n3p12
Deary I, Der G, Ford G, 2001. Reaction times and intelligence differences: A population-based cohort study. Intelligence, 9 (5): 389–399. doi:10.1016/S0160-2896(01)00062-9
Draper S, McMorris T, Parker J, 2010. Effect of acute exercise of differing intensities on simple and choice reaction and movement times. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 11(6): 536–541. doi:10.1016/j.psychsport.2010.05.003
Dyrbye L, Thomas M, Shanafelt T, 2005. Medical student distress: causes, consequences, and proposed solutions. Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 80(12): 1613–1622. doi:10.4065/80.12.1613
Fox C, Mueller S, Gray H, Raber J, Piper B, 2013. Evaluation of a short-form of the berg card sorting test. PloS One, 8(5): e63885. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0063885
Guthrie E, Black D, Shaw C, Hamilton J, Creed F, 1998. Psychological stress in medical students: a comparison of two very different university courses. Stress Med, 13(3): 179-184. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1099-1700(199707)13:3<179::AID-SMI740>3.0.CO;2-E
Hick W, 1952. On the rate of gain of information. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 4(1): 11–26 . doi:10.1080/17470215208416600
Jensen A, 2006. Clocking the mind: Mental chronometry and individual differences. Elsevier, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. https://arthurjensen.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Clocking-the-mind-Arthur-Jensen.pdf
McDuff D. J, Hernandez J, Gontarek S, Picard R, 2016. COGCAM: Contact-free Measurement of Cognitive Stress During Computer Tasks with a Digital Camera. CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, (pp. 4000–4004). doi:10.1145/2858036.2858247
Moffat K, McConnachie A, Ross S, 2004. First-year medical student stress and coping in a problem-based learning medical curriculum. Undergraduate Medical Education, 38(5): 482–491. doi:10.1046/j.1365-2929.2004.01814.x
Prabhavathi K, Hemamalini R, Thilip K G, Amalraj C, Maruthy K, Saravanan A, 2017. Correlational study of visual and auditory reaction time with their academic performance among the first-year medical students. National Journal of Physiology, Pharmacy and Pharmacology, 7(4): 371-374. doi:10.5455/njppp.2017.7.1131828112016
Rajprabha, Mahima S, Sudhanshu K, Anamika T, 2019. Reaction Time and Academic Performance: An Association to Determine the Cognitive Status of First Year Medical Students. International Journal of Medical Professionals, 5(4): 56-60. doi:10.21276/ijmrp.2019.5.4.014
Ratcliff R, Tuerlinckx F, 2002. Estimating parameters of the diffusion model: Approaches to dealing with contaminant reaction times and parameter variability. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 9 (3): 438-481. https://ppw.kuleuven.be/okp/_pdf/Ratcliff2002EPOTD.pdf doi: 10.3758/BF03196302
Ravenzwaaij D, Brown S, 2011. An integrated perspective on the relation between response speed and intelligence. Cognition, 119(3): 381-393. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2011.02.002
Riemann B, Lephart S, 2002. The Sensorimotor System, Part I: The Physiologic Basis of Functional Joint Stability. Journal of Athletic Training, 37(1): 71–79.
Sanders A, 1998. Elements of human performance: Reaction processes and attention in human skill. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. doi:10.4324/9780203774250
Shelton J, Kumar G, 2010. Comparison between Auditory and Visual Simple Reaction Times. Neuroscience and Medicine, 1(1): 30-32. doi:10.4236/nm.2010.11004
Spoorenberg T, 2007. Quality of age reporting: Extension and application of a modified Whipple's index. Population, 62(4): 729-742. doi:10.3917/popu.704.0847
Sternberg S. Benjamin T, 2015. Sequential Processes and the Shapes of Reaction Time Distributions. Psychological Review, 122(4): 830–837. doi:10.1037/a0039658
Taskin C, 2016. The visual and auditory reaction time of adolescents with respect to their academic achievements. Journal of Education and Training Studies, 4(3): 202-207. doi:10.11114/jets.v4i3.1374
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.46827/ejes.v9i8.4438
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
Copyright (c) 2022 Ketevan Janashia, Ana Chikviladze, Aleksandre Ramishvili, Levan Mikeladze
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Copyright © 2015-2023. European Journal of Education Studies (ISSN 2501 - 1111) is a registered trademark of Open Access Publishing Group. All rights reserved.
This journal is a serial publication uniquely identified by an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) serial number certificate issued by Romanian National Library (Biblioteca Nationala a Romaniei). All the research works are uniquely identified by a CrossRef DOI digital object identifier supplied by indexing and repository platforms. All authors who send their manuscripts to this journal and whose articles are published on this journal retain full copyright of their articles. All the research works published on this journal are meeting the Open Access Publishing requirements and can be freely accessed, shared, modified, distributed and used in educational, commercial and non-commercial purposes under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
