Visuaalse stiimuli ja kofeiini abil kontrollitud virgutusseisundi vahelise tingitud seose kujundamine

Abstract

Current study “Conditioning between visual stimulus and caffeine-induced arousal state” explores the effect of a visual shape as a conditioned stimulus associated to the drug induced state on sensory thresholds. It was found that presenting the above-threshold shape conditioned to caffeine had no effect on sensory thresholds as measured by perception of a weak test stimulus. It was concluded that designing a conditioned association between caffeine state and seeing a simple geometric shape is either impossible or considerably complicated, so that four 20-minute sessions do not suffice. It is possible that using some other type of cognitive task (e.g. attention or working memory tasks under some perceptual conditions) this kind of association may develop. This would require thorough research, in which the experimental task’s efficiency-promoting processes would be more sensitive to the effect of caffeine. It is also possible that 200 mg of caffeine is not a sufficient dose for prompting a noticeable effect on sensory thresholds. A surprising result was recorded when the effect of the conditioning-stimulus was considered – for some reason circle shaped stimulus facilitated the detection of near-threshold stimuli compared to the square shaped stimulus. This is an intriguing result which requires additional experimentation to verify whether this is an effect of the shape or the effect of the perceptual attributes associated with the shape (e.g., diameter, number of elementary features in the shape, average distance of the form’s boundary line from the location of test stimulus etc).