• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
• /
• v.4 no.1
• /
• pp.1-5
• /
• 2001

The evaluation of mental workload is measured by subjective ratings, physiological signals. It takes long time to analysis the measured signals and is very tedious and time-consumming work. Therefore, to evaluate the affect of workload effectively, real-time measurement system is required. In this paper, real-time mental workload measurement system using cardiac autonomic indiced which reflect well the mental workload was developed and evaluated. Analyzed indices were HR, IBI, Lorentz plot, CSI, CVI, and LF/HF ratio of heart rate variability. The system was applied to evaluate the affect of arithmetic task and showed good results. This system was consisted of ECG amplifier, A/D converter, and personal computer, and algorithm was implemented using LabVIEW.

• Journal of Korea Society of Industrial Information Systems
• /
• v.9 no.1
• /
• pp.56-62
• /
• 2004

This paper examined the change in reaction time and accuracy of mental work by physical activity. A treadmill-equipped instrument is used to attain several levels of physical activity. Subjects were recruited from college students and football players; and they were instructed to run on a treadmill at different speeds. In order to determine the individual levels of physical activity of subjects, in this paper, Borg's-RPE scales which indicates subjective levels of physical activity were obtained. And reaction time was evaluated before and after running by arithmetic calculation test Restricted within the limit of this experiment, the results of this study showed that arithmetic calculation performance as a scale of accuracy of mental work rather increase after the exercise even though there are slight difference among the subjects.

• Stress
• /
• v.27 no.2
• /
• pp.199-204
• /
• 2019

Backgoround: This study aimed to examine the influence of anxiety sensitivity on task performance and physiological stress response, and to assess the effect of depression in this process for the youth population. Methods: We presented participants with an uncontrollable stress situation where they were required to perform mental arithmetic, based on the Montreal Imaging Stress Task (MIST). A total of 29 participants volunteered for this study. They completed the Anxiety Sensitivity Index-Revised and Patient Health Questionnaire-9 to measure their levels of anxiety sensitivity and depression. Two saliva samples, one before and one after the experiment, were collected to assess the change in cortisol levels as an index of physiological stress response. Results: Participants with high anxiety sensitivity showed lower performance on the mental arithmetic tasks and a significant increase in a salivary cortisol level, compared to those with low anxiety sensitivity. Furthermore, cortisol levels showed a remarkable increase where high anxiety sensitivity was coupled with depressed mood. In other hands, the levels of cortisol remained unchanged despite high anxiety sensitivity with low depressed mood. Conclusions: Our results confirm that the interaction between anxiety sensitivity and depression affects participants' task performance and stress response, as measured through behavioral tasks and physiological data with self-report indices. Also, through the physiological data, we examined that those who have a high level of anxiety sensitivity showed maladaptive responses under high stressful situation.

• Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health
• /
• v.46 no.sup1
• /
• pp.22-27
• /
• 2013

The purpose of this study was to examine the beneficial effects of a new cognitive intervention program designed for the care and prevention of dementia, namely Learning Therapy. The training program used systematized basic problems in arithmetic and Japanese language as training tasks. In study 1, 16 individuals in the experimental group and 16 in the control group were recruited from a nursing home. In both groups, all individuals were clinically diagnosed with senile dementia of the Alzheimer type. In study 2, we performed a single-blind, randomized controlled trial in our cognitive intervention program of 124 community-dwelling seniors. In both studies, the daily training program using reading and arithmetic tasks was carried out approximately 5 days a week, for 15 to 20 minutes a day in the intervention groups. Neuropsychological measures were determined simultaneously in the groups both prior to and after six months of the intervention. The results of our investigations indicate that our cognitive intervention using reading and arithmetic problems demonstrated a transfer effect and they provide convincing evidence that cognitive training maintains and improves the cognitive functions of dementia patients and healthy seniors.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
• /
• v.36 no.5
• /
• pp.177-182
• /
• 2015

The activation of prefrontal cortex of brain during some mental tasks like mental arithmetic induce has been studied using hemodynamic imaging modalities. In this study, we focused on the differentiation of activated area in local prefrontal brain caused by the different mental activities as well as evaluating the classification accuracy of in-house fNIRS system. The study preliminarily validated the device including the signal quality and tightness of contact between detectors and prefrontal area. Experimental results of mental tasks on 5 subjects showed the subject dependent tendencies in correlated prefrontal activation and the area of highest accuracy.

• Biomedical Science Letters
• /
• v.13 no.3
• /
• pp.231-237
• /
• 2007

Subway environments such as crowd, passenger's gab, or subway-generated mechanical noise may become a potential stressor. The present study was sought to determine whether subway noise with or without mental activity affects cerebral hemodynamics and sympathetic system. Fifty-four healthy volunteers were divided group I which underwent subway noise (n=24) and group II which underwent a combined mental activity (mental arithmetic) with subway noise (n=30). Sympathetic factors such as heart rate (HR), blood pressure (BP) and heart rate-systolic pressure product (RPP), and mean blood flow velocity in the middle cerebral artery (MCAV) were measured before (baseline), during and after the noise-exposure. Systolic and diastolic blood pressure, HR and RPP significantly increased in group II (P<0.05) but not in group I during the noise-exposure. Peak-MCAV, diastolic-MCAV and mean-MCAV in the both groups were elevated during the noise-exposure (P<0.05) and the increased ratios in group II were greater than those in group I. These results suggest that a combined mental activity with subway noise may be a stressor which affects cerebral hemodynamics and sympathetic system.

• Journal of Oriental Neuropsychiatry
• /
• v.21 no.4
• /
• pp.163-173
• /
• 2010

Objectives : The objective of this study was to assess the effects of acupuncture applied at 114 and Liv3 points on heart rate variability (HRV) in normal subjects under mental stress. Methods: 36 healthy male and female subjects were recruited and randomized to a treatment group(18 subjects) or a control group (18 subjects). After 10-minutes rest period and instrumentation, both groups performed a mental stress test(Stroop color word test, Arithmetic test. four rule of arithmetic task) for l6-minutes. HRV was recorded before and after the mental stress. And then acupuncture needles were inserted on 114 and Liv3 for the study group. In the control group, they rested for l5-minutes. And Heart rate variability(HRV) was measured. Results: In the both groups, low frequency(LF) power, normalized low frequency power(LF(norm)) and ratio of low frequency to high frequency(LF/HF) was significantly increased after mental stress. Acupuncture induced significant decrease in low frequency(LF) power, normalized low frequency power(LF(norm)) and ratio of low frequency to high frequency (LF/HF) which was increased after mental stress test. In contrast, control group induced no changes. Conclusions : Acupuncture on 114 and Liv3 could be useful to decrease sympathetic activity and prevent the alteration of autonomic nervous system due to mental stress.

• School Mathematics
• /
• v.10 no.1
• /
• pp.123-138
• /
• 2008

The objective of this paper is to reveal the cause of failure of New Math in the field of the SMSG area education from the didactical point of view. At first, we analyzed Euclid's (Elements), De Morgan's (Elements of arithmetic), and Legendre's (Elements of geometry and trigonometry) in order to identify characteristics of the area conception in the SMSG. And by analyzing the controversy between Wittenberg(1963) and Moise(1963), we found that the elementariness and the mental object of the area concept are the key of the success of SMSG's approach. As a result, we conclude that SMSG's approach became separated from the mathematical contents of the similarity concept, the idea of same-area, incommensurability and so on. In this account, we disclosed that New Math gave rise to the lack of elementariness and geometrical mental object, which was the fundamental cause of failure of New Math.

• Journal of Convergence for Information Technology
• /
• v.11 no.10
• /
• pp.10-19
• /
• 2021

In this paper, we tried to derive characteristic parameters that reflect mental fatigue through EEG measurement and analysis. For this purpose, mental fatigue was induced through a resting state with eyes closed and performing subtraction operations in mental arithmetic for 30 minutes. Five subjects participated in the experiment, and all subjects were right-handed male students in university, with an average age of 25.5 years. Spectral analysis was performed on the EEG collected at the beginning and the end of the experiment to derive feature parameters reflecting mental fatigue. As a result of the analysis, the absolute power of the alpha band in the occipital lobe and the temporal lobe increased as the mental fatigue increased, while the relative power decreased. Also, the difference in power between resting state and task state showed that the relative power was larger than the absolute power. These results indicate that alpha relative power in the occipital lobe and temporal lobe is a feature parameter reflecting mental fatigue. The results of this study can be utilized as feature parameters for the development of an automated system for mental fatigue determination such as fatigue and drowsiness while driving.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
• /
• v.11 no.2
• /
• pp.689-695
• /
• 2010

The effect of the code conversion process of Korean script (Hangul), also known as words for numbers, was investigated using event-related potentials (ERPs) during mental arithmetic operations. Study subjects were asked to determine whether the arithmetic results of a given target stimuli were correctly matched. Visual inspection and statistics of mean ERPs showed stimulus type-dependent processing rather than task-dependent processing. Results of addition and multiplication tasks revealed that the overall temporal profiles of the Arabic numerals were similar to the Hangul words for numbers. The only exception to this observation was a delayed positive-slope peak occurring around 300 ms, which was likely related to the encoding process of Hangul words for numbers to Arabic-digits, defined as a 'transcoding-related potential.' Source analysis confirmed that the topography of different waveforms for the two conditions was attributed to a single dipole located in the left temporo-parietal area; this area is known to be involved in Hangul words for number processing. These results suggest that the initial processing for encoding words for numbers was followed by arithmetic operations without direct access of internal number representation. Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society. The Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society. The Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society. The Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society.