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

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.