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A study of brain mechanisms by which light affects theta bands in working memory

Published: 28 June 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Theta activity is thought to reflect the cognitive control mechanisms required for working memory retention, manipulation, and interference resolution. Existing studies have less explored whether theta band in working memory is affected by light conditions. In the present study, we set up light conditions in the experimental environment and allowed subjects to complete a 2-back experimental task, thereby exploring the activation level of theta band and related brain regions. The results showed that the mean power of theta band in the light-free group was slightly higher than that of the lighted group in both tasks, the reaction time was significantly reduced in both groups, and the difference in the mean accuracy between groups was not significant, indicating that the subjects were more concentrated in the light-free condition, which led to a better memory effect. The results of linear regression analysis showed that the average power of theta band and reaction time showed a more significant negative correlation, and retrospective analysis showed that the theta activity in the extraorbital and inferotemporal lobes was enhanced in both conditions, and the activity in a small part of the upper parietal lobe was enhanced in the light condition, while the change was not observed in the no-light condition, which indicated that the training in the light condition induced a partial activation of the parietal lobe. Taken together, these findings suggest that the visual 2-back task designed in this study enhances theta wave activity and thus improves working memory, that the control of light conditions also positively affects working memory, and finally that theta band enhancement can be used as an indicator of improved working memory, and that the 2-back is an effective tool for enhancing working memory capacity in adults.

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    BIC '24: Proceedings of the 2024 4th International Conference on Bioinformatics and Intelligent Computing
    January 2024
    504 pages
    ISBN:9798400716645
    DOI:10.1145/3665689
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 28 June 2024

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