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10:22 a.m., Oct. 31, 2002--UD students Greg Hajcak and Nicole McDonald’s poster depicting their research into the physiology of human error was selected as one of the three best student-authored poster presentations at the 42nd annual meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research in Washington, D.C., in October.
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| National poster competition winners Nicole McDonald and Greg Hajcak, with mentor Robert Simons, professor of psychology, watch senior Lindsey Dillinger demonstrate the psychophysiology experiment described in their winning poster. |
Robert Simons, professor of clinical psychology and associate chair of the psychology department, co-authored the paper on which the poster presentation was based and is directing the research at UD. He said there were 79 entries in a highly competitive contest and that “it is a tribute to two excellent students that their work was selected.”
Simons uses psychophysiological approaches to human emotion and cognitive processes to investigate the relationships between responses in subsystems of the central and autonomic nervous systems, like a person’s brain waves, heart rate and the functioning of sweat glands during simple behavioral tasks and how these responses relate to normal and abnormal cognition and emotion.
In the paper, “Error-Related Brain Activity: Ripples in the ANS,” Hajcak and McDonald described how they measured the error-related negative responses of 22 college students doing simple tasks designed to trigger errors using sensors attached to the head to track electrical activity in the brain and sensors on the body to measure autonomic functions. Each time a student made a mistake, approximately 50 to 150 milliseconds later, a negative wave was recorded over frontal brain regions followed closely by a more widely distributed positive wave. Immediately after the two brain waves, the autonomic systems kicked in with a drop in heart rate and an increase in sweat-gland activity. The positive brain wave and both autonomic measures were linked to conscious awareness of the error and to corrective actions in preparation for the next trial.
Simons, his students and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, are currently investigating adults, young adults and children with anxiety disorders such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and trichotillomania, an impulse disorder that causes people to pull out the hair from their scalp, eyelashes, eyebrows or other parts of the body.
“Many patients with anxiety disorders are overly concerned with performance and produce exaggerated brain-wave responses to their own errors. We are interested in who these particular patients are, when their error-related psychophysiology develops and whether it diminishes with treatment,” he said. "We're pretty excited about the project, and the poster award is a great bonus for all of us.”
Well-known for his research, Simons serves as editor-in-chief of “Biological Psychology,” one of the leading journals in the field of psychophysiology. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin and joined the UD faculty in 1979.
Article by Barbara Garrison
Photo by Kathy Flickinger
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