Previous Sessions Research Articles

Scrub Club: A Medical Student‐Led Initiative That Uses Experiential Learning Opportunities in the Cadaver Laboratory to Introduce Pre‐Clerkship Medical Students to Surgery

IntroductionMost medical students have very little exposure to surgical specialties in their pre‐clerkship years, especially when compared to non‐surgical specialities; and bring very little knowledge of surgical skills to their surgical clerkship rotations. Second‐year medical students (Meds2022) at Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry – Windsor Campus recognized this lack of early exposure to surgery as a potential barrier to their learning. Additionally, Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry – Windsor Campus is a distributed medical campus (DMC). DMCs often have less engagement from surgeons compared to larger academic centres, making learning directly from a surgical mentor more challenging. In an attempt to address these student‐perceived gaps in their curriculum, a surgery interest group made up of Meds2022 students instituted an innovative club – the Scrub Club. Teaching models for early exposure to surgery have been previously implemented at other campuses, however none have been completely student‐directed or as multifaceted as the Scrub Club at a DMC.AimThe aim of Scrub Club is to develop experiential learning opportunities that will help introduce pre‐clerkship medical students to surgery using the on‐site cadaver laboratory.MethodsScrub Club members encouraged the development of surgical skills and knowledge amongst themselves, as well as their peers, by hosting regular experiential learning sessions in the cadaver laboratory. Experiential sessions included student‐led demonstrations on surgical anatomy, suturing, and knot tying using cadavers. Community surgeons were also brought in by Scrub Club members to lead simulated surgeries on cadavers.ResultsSince September 2019, the club has hosted two anatomy information sessions, one suturing session, and two simulated surgeries on cadavers. Simulated surgeries included an appendectomy, a prostatectomy, a nephrectomy, a bowel resection, and a splenectomy. During the physician‐led surgery simulations, each student was given an opportunity to assist, and to employ the skills/knowledge that they had acquired from previous sessions taught by their peers. Verbal feedback given by club members, as well as other medical student attendees, indicated that the sessions had a positive impact; and at least two students cited Scrub Club as the reason they felt comfortable performing suturing during observerships. Additionally, Scrub Club members felt that they were better able to demonstrate competencies important to the medical profession, such as leadership, collaboration, and communication, during these teaching sessions.Discussion and ConclusionThe members of Scrub Club were successfully able to develop and implement a variety of experiential learning opportunities using the cadaver laboratory at Windsor Campus. These opportunities have the potential to increase the level of engagement of pre‐clerkship students in surgical specialities, and to establish a basic surgical skillset that can be expanded upon in clerkship. The medical competencies developed were the unintentional benefits of the club.

The Overnight Drift

This paper documents large positive returns to holding U.S. equity futures overnight during the opening hours of European markets. These returns are not explained by liquidity risk, volatility risk, tail events, or overnight news. Instead, consistent with models of inventory risk and demand for immediacy, we demonstrate a strong relationship with market sell-offs from the previous intraday session. Moreover, price reversals are strongest at the opening of European markets, when overnight trading volumes peak. Finally, the timing of overnight returns shifts predictably in response to exogenous variation in the arrival time of Asian investors due to daylight savings time asynchronicities.

Exploring the Nature of Undergraduates’ Peer Collaboration in a PBL Writing Process

Despite the importance of writing skills to academic success, many undergraduates face a lot of challenges with writing in English. Studies have shown that engaging and supporting students in a writing process help to improve the students’ writing performance. Therefore, this study used a Problem-based learning approach (PBL) in order to give students opportunities to be engaged and support one another in a writing process through face-to-face interactions. The paper specifically reports what the students do to support their peer in the PBL writing process. An intact class of 18 second-year students in an English Composition course in Nigeria was selected to participate in the study. Data were obtained through audio- and video-recording of the students’ face-to-face interactions. The findings showed that the participants supported theirs peer through various ways in the PBL process such as modelling their facilitators, sharing tasks and responsibilities, clarifying instructions and unclear terms, using dictionary, suggesting other sources to get more information, checking for consensus, creating humour, encouraging others to participate and raise their voices while speaking, restating time given to a session and giving overview of a previous session. The support provided by the peers helped the students to improve their writing. The study has some implications for writing teachers.

Blended Learning: Kombinasi Belajar Untuk Anak Usia Dini di Tengah Pandemi

Covid 19 pandemic hitting people arround world caused many changes in various aspects of life which one of them is education field. Government, teachers, families, and even students are required to be able to adapt to the situation. Breaking down the corona virus transmission, the government got deal with the rules of working and studying from home. Concerning the previous session of learning classically conducted, it seemed to be agreed that the rests are designed to be accessed online – which combination (offlne and online) was so called by blanded learning. That’s why the researcher put a high interest on whether it can effectively be applied at pandemic especially for Early Childhood Education. Data was collected through the questionnaires which are onlinely filled out by 30 teachers of 5 kindergartens who carried out blended learning. Data were then analyzed by using a trial scale, percentage formula and SPSS, 16 version. The results showed the effectiveness of the application of blended learning for early childhood when the pandemic was in the good category.

Enhancing Check-Reinforce Introduction With a Class Response System: The C2RI Method - A Five-Year Study

Some lecturers start their sessions by reviewing or summarizing the main contents covered in the previous session. In general, this review involves the teacher exposing the main concepts and, in some cases, asking about them. This approach, which could be called Check-Reinforce Introduction (CRI), might be seen as having one main drawback; namely, the restricted feedback that lecturers may receive from students due to shyness. Bearing in mind this limitation, we have created what we have called the Classroom Response System CRI (C2RI), which takes advantage of a smartphone-based Classroom Response System (CRS) to obtain more feedback from students during the CRI. We conducted a five-year study on teaching related to technological issues in order to obtain empirical data on whether students consider the use of CRI useful. This is, to our knowledge, the first study involving empirical quantitative data. For this purpose, during the study, we applied the new method (C2RI) to assess whether students prefer C2RI or CRI and whether students' level of attention, motivation, and performance improved or not. Our findings show that the majority of students consider both methods useful, but the scores are higher in C2RI and they perceive higher level of attention with this method. We have also discovered that their motivation to study between lectures decreased using C2RI, which correlates with a slight decrease in student performance on exams, concluding that this method has to be designed in a way that does not create a false sense of confidence in the students.

A Neighbor-Guided Memory-Based Neural Network for Session-Aware Recommendation

Session-aware recommendation is a special form of session-based recommendation, where users' historical interactions before the current session are available. Among the existing session-aware recommendation studies, recurrent neural network (RNN) is a popular choice to model users' current intent of the ongoing session as well as their general preference implied in previous sessions. However, these RNN-based methods present limited memory so as to have difficulty in characterizing long-term behaviour. In addition, when modeling a user's preference, existing studies mainly refer to his (her) own sessions, while ignore the collaborative information from sessions of other users that may share similar tastes. To tackle the above problems, we propose a neighbor-guided memory-based neural network (MNN) for session-aware recommendation task, which comprehensively considers users' short-term intent, long-term preference and cross-sessions information to yield the final recommendations. Specifically, we design a long-term memory generator to capture users' general preference from their historical sessions, meanwhile leverage the neighbor sessions of current session to obtain cross-session collaborative information. Furthermore, with the guidance of long-term memory and cross-session information, we employ a short-term memory generator to yield users' ongoing intent, which serves as the dominating part of recommendation. Extensive experimental results on three real world datasets show the effectiveness of our model, with improvements up to 12.0% on 30MUSIC, 26.5% on NOWPLAYING and 13.5% on TMALL in terms of Recall@20, respectively. Analysis on current session length and the number of historical interacted items comprehensively demonstrates the superiority of our proposal on processing long sessions and modeling users' long-term behaviour.

Translational Difficulties in Querying Rats on “Orientation”

The aim of this study was to translate the “orientation” query of the ADAS-Cog inventory to rats and to investigate whether they can determine which time of the day they are. For this purpose, we established a modified Morris water-maze navigation task where the escape platform was placed onto various locations at different times of the day: “morning”, “noon” and “evening”. In each of these sessions rats swam a “query” trial and a “confirmatory” trial, 30 min apart. Lister Hooded rats randomly chose among the three possible target locations, while Long Evans rats partly followed a win-stay strategy by preferring to visit first to the platform position of the previous session. Despite simplifying the task to a morning–evening discrimination, Lister Hooded rats continued searching by chance, while Long Evans rats switched to the mentally less demanding random strategy. We then inserted a board into the pool which required longer swimming path from the animals when they were correcting an initial wrong choice, but this modification did not result in a change in the above strategies. Lastly, in a separate group of Long–Evans rats, the training conditions were modified inasmuch an incorrect choice was definitely punished by impeding the animals to correct it and confining them to a platform-free part of the maze for the whole trial period. However, even these stricter conditions were not sufficient to make the rats distinguish times of the day. The observed lack of time discrimination may source from an evolutionary built in mechanism characteristic for the rat species or this ability may have only been lost in laboratory rats.

PAREAMENTO AO MODELO COM AJUSTE DO ATRASO: UMA REVISÃO DA LITERATURA

O Pareamento-ao-Modelo com Ajuste do Atraso (TDMTS) é utilizado para estudar memória de trabalho e fenômenos correlatos. Neste procedimento, a escolha do estímulo correspondente ao modelo deve ocorrer após um intervalo de tempo desde a retirada do modelo (atraso). O atraso é ajustado a partir dos acertos e erros do participante. O objetivo deste artigo foi fazer uma revisão de literatura de estudos que manipularam variáveis metodológicas do TDMTS. A partir de buscas em bancos de dados, na internet e nas referências dos artigos encontrados, foram analisados 16 artigos, que descrevem 21 experimentos, publicados de 1965 a 2019. A revisão mostrou os critérios e valores de parâmetros mais utilizados na literatura, e resumiu os efeitos da manipulação de aspectos metodológicos. Atrasos ajustados mais longos estão relacionados ao: aumento da observação ao modelo, programação do atraso inicial de cada sessão baseada nos atrasos finais da sessão anterior; critério de ajuste mais tolerante; maiores valores do incremento; e programação de reforços diferenciais para cada discriminação. Estes resultados carecem de replicações controladas para avaliar a generalidade, considerando a variedade de parâmetros, critérios e sujeitos experimentais.Palavras-chave: discriminação condicional, memória de trabalho, pareamento-ao-modelo com atraso, ajuste do atraso, revisão.

Familiarity with visual stimuli boosts recency bias in macaques.

To probe how non-human primates (NHPs) decode temporal dynamic stimuli, we used a two-alternative forced choice task (2AFC), where the cue was dynamic: a movie snippet drawn from an animation that transforms one image into another. When the cue was drawn from either the beginning or end of the animation, thus heavily weighted towards one (the target) of both images (the choice pair), then primates performed at high levels of accuracy. For a subset of trials, however, the cue was ambiguous, drawn from the middle of the animation, containing information that could be associated to either image. Those trials, rewarded randomly and independent of choice, offered an opportunity to study the strategy the animals used trying to decode the cue. Despite being ambiguous, the primates exhibited a clear strategy, suggesting they were not aware that reward was given non-differentially. More specifically, they relied more on information provided at the end than at the beginning of those cues, consistent with the recency effect reported by numerous serial position studies. Interestingly and counterintuitively, this effect became stronger for sessions where the primates were already familiar with the stimuli. In other words, despite having rehearsed with the same stimuli in a previous session, the animals relied even more on a decision strategy that did not yield any benefits during a previous session. In the discussion section we speculate on what might cause this behavioral shift towards stronger bias, as well as why this behavior shows similarities with a repetition bias in humans known as the illusory truth effect.

Therapist and Treatment-Seeking Students’ Perceptions of Telemental Health

There is limited research on client and clinician perceptions of telemental health and how these perceptions differ. The current study examines interest in and perceptions of the advantages and disadvantages of telemental health, from both college students, who are seeking mental health services, and clinicians. College student clients (N = 270) and therapists (N = 46) were surveyed to determine perceptions (e.g., benefits, concerns, preference, comfort) of several telemental health modalities. Both clinicians and clients reported interest in telemental health, endorsing convenience, frequency of interaction, and ease of access to previous session’s materials as advantages. However, clinicians and student clients also endorsed at least mild concerns about the efficacy and confidentiality of therapy, the effect on the therapeutic relationship, and technology concerns; clinicians endorsed significantly greater concerns about telemental health than clients. Dissemination of research demonstrating the effectiveness of telemental health to both clients and clinicians is necessary.

The Development of Ironchild: A Web-Based Intervention to Improve Adherence in Children with Iron Deficiency Anemia

INTRODUCTION Iron deficiency anemia (IDA) affects approximately 3% of children 1 to 3 years of age and is associated with poor neurocognitive outcomes. Children of Hispanic/Latino ethnicity, from primarily Spanish-speaking homes, and/or those of low socioeconomic status, are disproportionately affected. Oral iron therapy for 3 to 6 months is considered standard care therapy and mitigates these effects. Yet non-adherence often results in treatment failure, prolonging the treatment course and negative health consequences of IDA. Limited previous work has focused on interventions to improve adherence to iron therapy. Behavior change interventions, particularly when designed within a theoretical framework, can improve rates of treatment adherence. Our objective was to design a theoretically-based behavioral intervention to improve adherence to oral iron therapy in young children with nutritional IDA. METHODS Formative research was conducted via a mixed-methods study of 20 children with nutritional IDA and their primary caretaker. Demographic information, including number of children and caregivers in the home, was obtained from the primary caregiver. Clinical aspects of patients' IDA diagnosis and iron therapy were obtained from the electronic medical record. Semi-structured interviews with caregivers were conducted to characterize barriers to and facilitators of iron therapy. A framework for a technology-based intervention, named IRONCHILD, was created to coincide with clinical visit time points over a three-month period. Results from the formative research, along with constructs from the self-determination theory of motivation (autonomy, competence, relatedness), informed message content for the intervention scripts. This theory was selected because the degree to which its three principle constructs (basic psychological needs) are met drives levels of motivation to perform a specific behavior such as medication adherence. Three scripted online intervention sessions were developed, professionally translated into Spanish, and then animated by a professional animation and web design studio. Audio recording with a professional bilingual voice actor provided the narration for online sessions. RESULTS IRONCHILD is an interactive website with specific message content designed to be delivered at three standard of care clinical visits (Figure). At the initial visit, participants are introduced to a relational agent or virtual health educator, Maria, who is a pediatric nurse and mother of a child formerly treated for IDA. Maria provides an introduction to the overall program format and content and guides each session. Participants next view a Topic Introduction animation that provides an overview of the diagnosis of IDA, its clinical consequences, and a typical treatment course with oral iron therapy. This is followed by two unique content segments that provide information on (1) dietary counseling and (2) administration of oral iron therapy. Following each of the content segment, participants view question/response options, make a selection, and receive feedback. At the end of the session, participants select goal(s) related to therapy adherence for the interval between clinical visits. The second session provides two additional content segments that focus on (1) problem-solving for difficulties related to medication administration and (2) identifying motivating factors to adhere to therapy. The third session allows users to access all previous content and provides closing information about adhering to any ongoing treatment recommendations from their child's provider. Between visits, access to the website occurs via a unique username and password caregivers can use to logon to the website and view previous sessions. All aspects of IRONCHILD are available in both English and Spanish. Finally, an administrative dashboard for IRONCHILD captures program usage information as families log onto the program and navigate the sessions (e.g., number of log-ins; responses to question prompts; goals set; goal attainment). CONCLUSIONS IRONCHILD is a theoretically-based online intervention designed to improve adherence to oral iron therapy in caregivers of young children with nutritional IDA. Further research is needed to assess the effectiveness of the intervention on adherence as well as factors that affect implementation into routine clinical care.

A BCI based visual-haptic neurofeedback training improves cortical activations and classification performance during motor imagery

Objective. We proposed a brain–computer interface (BCI) based visual-haptic neurofeedback training (NFT) by incorporating synchronous visual scene and proprioceptive electrical stimulation feedback. The goal of this work was to improve sensorimotor cortical activations and classification performance during motor imagery (MI). In addition, their correlations and brain network patterns were also investigated respectively. Approach. 64-channel electroencephalographic (EEG) data were recorded in nineteen healthy subjects during MI before and after NFT. During NFT sessions, the synchronous visual-haptic feedbacks were driven by real-time lateralized relative event-related desynchronization (lrERD). Main results. By comparison between previous and posterior control sessions, the cortical activations measured by multi-band (i.e. alpha_1: 8–10 Hz, alpha_2: 11–13 Hz, beta_1: 15–20 Hz and beta_2: 22–28 Hz) absolute ERD powers and lrERD patterns were significantly enhanced after the NFT. The classification performance was also significantly improved, achieving a ~9% improvement and reaching ~85% in mean classification accuracy from a relatively poor performance. Additionally, there were significant correlations between lrERD patterns and classification accuracies. The partial directed coherence based functional connectivity (FC) networks covering the sensorimotor area also showed an increase after the NFT. Significance. These findings validate the feasibility of our proposed NFT to improve sensorimotor cortical activations and BCI performance during motor imagery. And it is promising to optimize conventional NFT manner and evaluate the effectiveness of motor training.

The associations between individual differences in working memory and the effectiveness of immediate and delayed corrective feedback

AbstractThis paper reports on a study investigating the role of working memory in predicting L2 development under immediate and delayed corrective feedback (CF) conditions. A total of 106 seventh-grade EFL learners were assigned to three groups: Immediate CF, Delayed CF, and Task Only. Each group underwent three treatment sessions during which they performed six focused communicative tasks – two in each session – involving the use of the English past tense. The Immediate CF group received feedback on their erroneous use of the target structure during their task performance in Session 1; the Delayed CF group did not receive feedback until the final treatment session; and the Task Only group performed the communicative tasks without receiving any feedback. Treatment effects were measured through a grammaticality judgement test and an elicited imitation test. Working memory was measured by means of an operation span test. The results revealed that working memory was a significant predictor only of the effects of delayed CF, not those of immediate CF or task only. The findings suggest that delayed CF may have imposed a heavier processing burden on the learners’ working memory due to the need to match the delayed feedback with the errors in their procedural knowledge manifested in previous sessions. Based on the results of this and other empirical studies, the authors argue for the superiority of immediate feedback over delayed feedback.

ALTERAÇÕES NA PRESSÃO ARTERIAL EM IDOSOS SUBMETIDOS AO TREINAMENTO RESISTIDO

The practice of regular physical activity in improving the quality of life has attracted attention, especially in the increasingly growing elderly population. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the blood pressure improvement of the elderly submitted to resistance training during 12 weeks. A survey was attended by 30 seniors. Weight and height measurement, BMI calculation, perimetry, and systolic and diastolic blood pressure were measured before and after the training session. The results were 12 weeks of resistance training promoted reductions in resting systolic blood pressure values, even when compared to the previous training session (p <0.001). No reductions in pre-training diastolic blood pressure were found (p <0.809). The reduction of cardiovascular pressure after resistance resistively minimize the risk of cardiovascular events. It is concluded that a resistance training practice for an elderly population has many benefits. Resistance training can be used as non-drug therapy in prevention as well as in treatment and systemic arterial hypertension.

The effect of prenatal exposure to music on fetal movements and fetal heart rate: a pilot study

Objective To assess and compare fetal cardiac parameters of fetuses listening to music before and during nonstress test, only during the test or never. Study design Thirty healthy mother-fetus dyads were randomized in a 1:1:1 ratio to one of three groups: group A in which fetuses were submitted to prelistening phase (33rd + 0 to 36th + 3 week) and listening sessions during 4 nonstress tests, group B in which fetuses were submitted to listening sessions during 4 nonstress tests, and group C receiving 4 nonstress tests without any listening. We assessed mean fetal heart rate, fetal heart rate accelerations, fetal heart rate decelerations, fetal movements and uterine contractility. Results Fetuses of the group A, who had already listened to a particular piece of music during previous sessions, had significantly increased their heart rate accelerations and movements during the music listening session of the last nonstress test. No significant changes were observed in the number of uterine contractions. Conclusions Our findings show that fetuses slightly respond to that music they know, but they do not significantly respond to unknown music.

The Effects of Immersive Simulation on Targeted Collaboration Skills among Undergraduates in Special Education

The use of immersive simulation as a pedagogical tool has great potential for making a significant impact on student learning in higher education. In this study, the effect of immersive simulation was evaluated for a cohort of undergraduate special education majors. The investigation aimed to determine whether facilitating an immersive co-planning simulation would have an impact on targeted collaboration skills, and also whether vicarious observational learning would occur for students who observed the simulation. Pre-service teachers in special education were evaluated by their peers on their ability to demonstrate knowledge of (1) co-teaching and co-planning, (2) professional communication, and (3) supports for students with disabilities. The results indicate that they did a better job of facilitating a co-planning session after having first practiced doing so via immersive simulation during a previous class session. It was also discovered that vicarious observational learning during immersive simulation positively impacted performance.

Practices in Preventing Pneumonia by Caregivers of Under-5 Children Attended at a Referral Hospital in Zimbabwe

Pneumonia is the foremost cause of mortality in children under the age of 5, with most deaths occurring in the sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. In Zimbabwe pneumonia continues to be one of the chief causes for admissions of pediatric patients, with majority presenting with severe form. Since access to health facilities is limited to some areas in many developing countries such as Zimbabwe, the caregivers’ practices in pneumonia prevention can help reduce the occurrence of pneumonia in children who are under five years. The aim of the study is to determine the practices in pneumonia prevention by caregivers as it is an important tool in reducing morbidity and mortality. This study utilized a descriptive cross sectional design. The target population was caregivers of children under five who visited the pediatric casualty department at Parirenyatwa Group of Hospitals. Simple random sampling was used in the study. A structured questionnaire with two sections of demographic characteristics and pneumonia prevention practices was used to measure the preventive measures done by caregivers. All participants gave an informed consent to participate in the research study after the researcher had fully explained to them the purpose of the study using the language they are well conversant with. Permission to execute this study was granted by the head of Department of Nursing Science and Joint Research Ethics Committee. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze data. Computerized Statistical Microsoft Excel and Package for Social Sciences was also used to analyze numerical data to obtain percentages, mean, modes, averages and frequencies. Data was presented in graphs and tables. Twenty-eight (70%) participants exhibited average levels of practicing pneumonia prevention and the least number (7.5%) of the participants showed high levels of preventing pneumonia. This may be due to absenteeism of caregivers when pneumonia health education is given, it might be also due to the fact that the majority of the participants were first time mothers and fathers and also might be as a result of neglecting pneumonia preventive measures when health education is being given. The findings can be said to be a better outcome as the majority are averagely preventing pneumonia, but for pneumonia and associated deaths to be decreased to an insignificant rate, the majority should be highly practicing pneumonia prevention. Therefore, health education need to be given more regularly to cater for first time mothers and fathers, and those who would be absent when previous sessions are done. Further studies should be done on factors that might hinder proper implication of pneumonia prevention practices.

Enhancement of self compassion in psychotherapy: The role of therapists’ interventions

Aim: Self Compassion (SC) has been consistently linked to decreased emotional distress and is offered as a mechanism of change in several therapeutic approaches. The current study aimed to identify therapists’ interventions that enhance clients’ SC within individual psychodynamic psychotherapy. We examined a diverse set of interventions as predictors of clients’ SC, on treatment and session levels. We hypothesized that improvement in SC will be associated with greater use of directive or common factor interventions. Method: Client/therapist (N = 89) dyads from a university-based community clinic participated in the study. Therapists’ interventions and changes in clients’ SC level were monitored at each psychotherapy session. Results: Clients’ SC in a given session was not predicted by therapist use of interventions from any of the three clusters in the previous session. However, positive change in SC across treatment was predicted by greater use of directive interventions. Furthermore, among clients with low pretreatment SC, a positive change in SC across treatment was predicted by lesser use of common factor interventions. Discussion: The results highlight the importance of understanding clients’ pretreatment characteristics when selecting therapeutic interventions and suggest that the integration of directive interventions into the psychodynamic therapeutic practice may be beneficial in enhancing clients’ SC.

Facilitating Calibration in High-Speed BCI Spellers via Leveraging Cross-Device Shared Latent Responses.

This paper proposes a novel device-to-device transfer-learning algorithm for reducing the calibration cost in a steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP)-based brain-computer interface (BCI) speller by leveraging electroencephalographic (EEG) data previously acquired by different EEG systems. The transferring is done by projecting the scalp-channel EEG signals onto a shared latent domain across devices. Three spatial filtering techniques, including channel averaging, canonical correlation analysis (CCA), and task-related component analysis (TRCA), were employed to extract the shared responses from different devices. The transferred data were integrated into a template-matching-based algorithm to detect SSVEPs. To evaluate its transferability, this paper conducted two sessions of simulated online BCI experiments with ten subjects using 40 visual stimuli modulated by joint frequency-phase coding method. In each session, two different EEG devices were used: first, the Quick-30 system (Cognionics, Inc.) with dry electrodes, and second, the ActiveTwo system (BioSemi, Inc.) with wet electrodes. The proposed method with CCA- and TRCA-based spatial filters achieved significantly higher classification accuracy compared with the calibration-free standard CCA-based method. This paper validated the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method in implementing calibration-free SSVEP-based BCIs. The proposed method has great potentials to enhance practicability and usability of real-world SSVEP-based BCI applications by leveraging user-specific data recorded in previous sessions even with different EEG systems and montages.

FACTORS DETERMINING SUCCESSFUL NEUROBIOFEEDBACK IN ATHLETES

Alpha-stimulating neurobiofeedback is actively introduced into sports training. Successful training contributes to optimal functioning and sports performance enhancement. However, not all athletes are able to achieve their goals. The main problem is the absence of the data explaining the effect of sports qualification, specialization, and gender on successful neurobiofeedback. Aim. The article deals with establishing the correlation between sports qualification, specialization (depending on movement character), gender, and successful neurobiofeedback. Materials and methods. 216 athletes (124 males and 92 females) participated in a 15-day neurobiofeedback course with the Boslab-alpha equipment (Russia). The average age of participants is 19 ± 0.1 years. All participants have 5 or more years of sports experience. All athletes provided their written informed consent for participation in the study. The 25–30-minute sessions of neurobiofeedback were conducted once per day. The electrodes were set up in the frontal and parietal area in a bipolar mode according to the 10–20 international system (F1 and P3). The increase in the spectrum power of alpha range by no less than 10 % compared to the previous session was considered as successful neurobiofeedback. We calculated the percentage of successful and unsuccessful training sessions for each participant. Statistical analysis of the &#x0D; data obtained was performed with the help of SPSS 13.0 software. Results. The study of successful training in athletes divided into groups in terms of gender, sports qualification, and sports specialization did not reveal any statistically significant differences. By using multifactor dispersion analysis, it was established that successful neurobiofeedback in athletes depended on all the abovementioned factors (F = 2.780; P &lt; 0.05). Conclusion. Successful neurobiofeedback in athletes is determined by the combination of three factors (gender, sports specialization, sports qualification), which do not possess significant effect when studied separately.