Touch Perception

A wavelet transform program that I constructed for power and coherence calculations yielded a net gain over three fold in overall frequency resolution in comparison with previous methods. Applying Granger causality would futher the program and improve the questions that can be answered regarding tactile decision making and as well as research questions in other behavioral paradigms.

Visual Perception

Currently I have finished doing a white matter connectivity analysis of video game players in the behavioral paradigm of visual perceptual decision making using DSI-Studio. Specifically, I was working on modeling the dorsal and ventral visual pathways in video game players compared with nongamers in order to investigate potential differences in white matter connectivity during a visual decision making task. Relevant measures such as the quantitative anisotropy and fractional anisotropy were extracted from this analysis and then tested for significant differences between the two groups. Furthermore the functional connectivity both directed (Granger) and undirected (pair-wise, FC) were compared between groups. Gamers were found to have significant differences in the upper dorsal stream. Future directions for this project will be to consider a whole brain analysis by constructing structural and functional connectivity matricies from which techniques such as classifition of type based on prominent connectivity features of gamers and dyanamic causal modeling.