The Analysis of HRV and Approximate Entropy for Quantitative Application in Stroop Experiments

Abstract

Stroop experiments are commonly used to test attention in psychology With this type of analysis differences in reaction time are used as indicators to compare physiological parameters such as brain activity Unfortunately this involves expensive and time-consuming methods such as EEG and fMRI The aim of the study was to employ low-cost convenient instruments with simple parameters to investigate variations in the physiological parameters relevant to Stroop experiments Specifically photoplethysmography (PPG) was used to measure changes in peripheral blood flow and PP intervals (PPIs) were calculated for complexity analysis A total of 15 healthy subjects participated in these experiments PPG and EEG signals were measured simultaneously in the Stroop experiment Approximate entropy (ApEn) and heart rate variability (HRV) were applied as parameters in PPG and power spectrum were applied to analyze EEG signals Our results show that higher ApEn values are associated with lower Stroop interference (the difference in reaction time between inconsistent and consistent color-words) However we did not observe this result for HRV In the EEG results significant differences were observed between the two tasks for the theta and alpha bands at the Fz electrode and for the beta band at the Cz electrode

Date of Award	2015 Sept 4
Original language	English
Supervisor	Kuo-Sheng Cheng (Supervisor)