Monitoring Brain Activity While Studying Can Help Predict Test Performance

A new study shows that using an EEG while a person is studying information can predict their performance on a test.

Research at Sandia National Laboratories has shown that it's possible to predict how well people will remember information by monitoring their brain activity while they study.

A team under Laura Matzen of Sandia's cognitive systems group was the first to demonstrate predictions based on the results of monitoring test volunteers with electroencephalography (EEG) sensors.

For example, "if you had someone learning new material and you were recording the EEG, you might be able to tell them, 'You're going to forget this, you should study this again,' or tell them, 'OK, you got it and go on to the next thing,'" Matzen said.

The team monitored test subjects' brain activity while they studied word lists, then used the EEG to predict who would remember the most information. Because researchers knew the average percentage of correct answers under various conditions, they had a baseline of what brain activity looked like for good and poor memory performance. The computer model predicted five of 23 people tested would perform best. The model was correct: They remembered 72 percent of the words on average, compared to 45 percent for everyone else.

The study is part of Matzen's long-term goal to understand the Difference Related to Subsequent Memory, or Dm Effect, an index of brain activity encoding that distinguishes subsequently remembered from subsequently forgotten items. The measurable difference gives cognitive neuroscientists a way to test hypotheses about how information is encoded in memory.

She's interested in what causes the effect and what can change it, and hopes her research eventually leads to improvements in how students learn. She'd like to discover how training helps people performing at different levels and whether particular training works better for certain groups.

The study, funded under Sandia's Laboratory Directed Research and Development program (LDRD), had two parts: predicting how well someone will remember what's studied and predicting who will benefit most from memory training.

Matzen presented the results of the first part of the study in April at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society conference in Chicago. She presented preliminary findings on the second part this summer to the Cognitive Science and Technology External Advisory Board, made up of representatives of universities, industry and laboratories who advise the investment area team managing the LDRD portfolio.

The second part tested different types of memory training to see how they changed participants' memory performance and brain activity. One of Matzen's goals is to find out whether recording a person's brain activity while they use their natural approach to studying can predict what kind of training would work best for that person.

She's still analyzing those findings, but said preliminary results are encouraging. The computer model from the earlier study was used to predict who would perform best on the memory tasks, and the high performers did even better after memory training.

"That's promising because one of the things we want to do is see if we can use the brain activity to predict how people react to the training, whether it will be effective for them," Matzen said.

A next step would be "to use more real-world memory working tasks, such as what military personnel would have to learn as new recruits, and see if the same patterns apply to more complex types of learning," she said.

About 90 volunteers spent nine to 16 hours over five weeks in testing for the memory training techniques study. Their first session developed a baseline for how well they remembered words or images. Most then underwent memory training for three weeks and were retested.

A control group received no training. A second group practiced mental imagery strategy, thinking up vivid images to remember words and pictures. The final group went through "working memory" training to increase how much information they could handle at a time. Matzen said that averages about seven items, such as digits in a phone number.

Each volunteer, shut into a sound-proof booth, watched a screen that flashed words or images for one second, interrupted with periodic quizzes on how well the person remembered what was shown.

"It's designed to be really difficult because we want lots of room to improve after memory training," Matzen said. The test was divided into five sections, each about 20 minutes long followed by a break to keep volunteers alert.

Each section tested a different type of memory. The first, middle and last sections consisted of single nouns. During quizzes, volunteers hit buttons for yes or no, indicating whether they'd seen the word before. The other two sections combined adjectives and nouns or pairs of unrelated drawings, with volunteers again tested on what they remembered. The image section tested associative memory -- memory for two unrelated things. Matzen said that's the most difficult because it links arbitrary relationships.

When performance was compared before and after training, the control group did not change, but the mental imagery group's performance improved on three of the five tasks.

"Imagery is a really powerful strategy for grouping things and making them more memorable," Matzen said.

The working memory group did worse on four of the five tasks after training.

Volunteers trained on working memory -- remembering information for brief periods -- improved on the task they'd trained on, but training did not carry over to other tasks, Matzen said.

She believes it boils down to strategy: The imagery training group learned a strategy, while working memory training simply tried to push the limits of memory capacity.

While the imagery group did better overall, they made more mistakes than the other groups when tested on "lures" that were similar, but not the same, as items they had memorized.

"They study things like 'strong adhesive' and 'secret password,' and then I might test them on 'strong password,' which they didn't see, but they saw both parts of it," Matzen said. "The people who have done the imagery training make many more mistakes on the recombinations that keep the same concept. If something kind of fits with their mental image they'll say yes to it even if it's not quite what they saw before."

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Wristband For Epileptic Seizures Shows Promise

MIT researchers, together with a team from two Boston hospitals, have provided early evidence in this week's issue of Neurology, that a simple, unobtrusive wrist sensor can measure the severity of epileptic seizures as accurately as electroencephalograms (EEGs) yet without requiring scalp electrodes and electrical leads.

The device could potentially collect clinically useful data from epilepsy patients during their daily routines instead of having to visit the hospital for observation. If the early results are confirmed, the device would even be able to alert patients to seek immediate medical attention when their seizures are severe enough.

Professor of media arts and sciences at MIT, Rosalind Picard, and her team originally designed the sensors to measure the emotional states of children with autism given that their outward behavior can be different to that what they actual feel. The sensor measures the skin's electrical conductance, which indicates the state of the sympathetic nervous system that controls the human fight-or-flight response.

The study, conducted at the Children's Hospital in Boston, revealed that the higher a patient's skin conductance is during a seizure, the longer it took for the patient's brain to resume neural oscillations, i.e. brain waves that are measured by EEGs.

According to at least one clinical study, there is a correlation between the duration of brain-wave suppression after seizures and the number of sudden unexplained deaths in epilepsy (SUDEP) that can occur hours after a seizure. In the U.S. alone, thousands of people die from SUDEP.

At present, epileptic patients may use various criteria, one of them being the duration of the seizure, to establish whether a seizure is severe enough to seek immediate medical attention.

However, Picard says:

"What we found was that this severity measure had nothing to do with the length of the seizure."

The data from the wrist sensor could ultimately provide patients with vital information as to whether they can continue what they were doing or going to the emergency room.The benefits of the wrist sensors for treating epilepsy turned out to be a supplemental discovery.

Picard explains:

"We'd been working with kids on the autism spectrum, and I didn't realize, but a lot of them have seizures."

When Picard and her team reviewed the data from their autism studies, they observed that huge spikes in skin conductance sometimes preceded seizures. This led to the conclusion that the sensors may actually be able to predict seizure onset.

Many of Picard's MIT students were working at her lab through MIT's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), amongst them also Joseph Madsen's daughter, the director of the Epilepsy Surgery Program at the Children's Hospital. Picard remarks: "I decided it was time to meet my UROP's dad."

Madsen agreed to allow the team to test the sensors on patients with severe epilepsy who were hospitalized for up to a week for constant EEG monitoring. Picard and her team debated to use several off-the-shelf sensors for the project, but, she says: "At the time, there was nothing we could buy that did what we needed. Finally, we just built our own."

According to Picard's student Ming-Zher Poh:

"It's a big challenge to make a device robust enough to withstand long hours of recording. We were recording days or weeks in a row."

Some of their early sensor versions showed that some fairly common gestures could produce false signals and Picard says that eliminating the sensors' susceptibility to such sources of noise proved to be a process of trial and error.

Poh adds:

"I put a lot of thought into how to make it really comfortable and as non-intrusive as possible. So I packaged it all into typical sweatbands."

Given that his study participants were children, Poh says:

"I allowed them to choose their favorite character on their wristband - for example, Superman, or Dora the Explorer, whatever they like. To them, they were wearing a wristband. But there was a lot of complicated sensing going on inside the wristband."

Picard continues investigating the device's potential to predict seizures, whilst her collaborators at the Children's Hospital are performing a follow-up study on the one reported in Neurology. A similar study is about to start at the Brigham and Women's Hospital that will use customized sensors produced by Picard's company Affectiva.

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EEG and Video EEG Guide: Reference Sites for Information About The Test For Children, Teens and Young Adults

Electroencephalogram (EEG) and Video EEG

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Fast Facts About EEG

An EEG does not hurt. Typically, its a boring, bad hair day. 

• The EEG measures the electrical activity in the brain called brain waves.
• Your child should not drink anything with caffeine in it on the day of the test.
• Words are important when talking to an apprehnesive child.  I avoid scary medical words when talking to an apprehensive patient.  
  
  
  Small" button-shaped stickers  or golden plates" called electrodes will be placed on your child’s scalp to measure the brain activity.  The electrodes are connecte to "rainbow strings" 
  or wires.  "Dr Rotenberg's friend " or the technician will clean little areas on your head with "hair gel" or shampoo.
• All testing takes place on the outside of your child’s body and will not hurt.
• An EEG takes about 1-2 hours to complete.

Fast Facts About Video EEG

• During the video EEG, your child will be video recorded while the EEG is done.
• Like an EEG, this test does not hurt. But, its SUPER boring.
• This test is usually done at the hospital.
• This test takes from 12 hours to several days, depending on the information that is needed.

What Is An Electroencephalogram (EEG)?

An electroencephalogram (ee-leck-tro-en-SEFF-a-lo-gram) or EEG uses small button-shaped electrodes on the outside of the scalp to record the brain’s electrical activity or brain waves.  These brain waves are the way brain cells talk to one another and get information from the brain to the rest of the body. An EEG gives doctors a record of that activity by recording it onto a computer or printing it out on a piece of paper.

An EEG helps doctors understand what is happening inside the brain. It can help doctors:

• Tell if a child’s level of alertness or consciousness is normal.
• Point out something that is not normal in one part of the brain.
• See if a child has a tendency to have seizures or convulsions.
• See if a child may have a certain kind of epilepsy.

Sometimes a child who has been having seizures may have a normal EEG. That is because the problem causing the seizures may come and go. When that is the case, the doctor may want to do another EEG, a longer EEG or a video EEG.

What Is A Video EEG?

A video EEG records  video your child while the regular EEG is being done. The video recording is done over a longer period of time than a regular EEG. 

• A video EEG can take from 6 hours to several days, depending on the information that is needed. 
• The video EEG is usually done in the hospital, where it is safe to allow your child to have some seizures. It lets doctors record the seizures with the EEG to see how your child behaves when those seizures happen.

Home Preparation

Before your child’s EEG or video EEG:

• Wash your child’s hair the night before the test, but do not use any oil, gel or hairspray. Please do not braid or pull up long hair, and do not use any hair extensions.
• If you were given special instructions about waking your child up early or changing his or her sleep schedule on the day of the EEG, please follow these instructions. Some EEGs need to be done when a child is sleep-deprived to get the right information.
• Give your child his or her medications as usual, unless your doctor tells you otherwise. 
• On the day of the test, dress your child in clothing that does not slip on and off over the head.  Shirts that zip or button up the front or back are preferred. 
• Bring a list of all the medications your child takes, including how often your child takes each medication and how much your child takes with each dose. 
• Your child’s doctor will give you specific instructions about when your child can eat before and after the test. 
• Your child should not have any drinks that have caffeine in them on the day of the test. These drinks include soda or pop with caffeine, coffee and tea. 
• You may bring along a “comfort” item—such as a stuffed animal or “blankie”—for your child to hold during the test.
  
  
  Remind teens and young adults this is going to be a "BAD HAIR DAY". Bring a hat if they are concerned about their image.

The Test

An EEG is simple and painless. Here is what to expect:

• Your child will be asked to lie down on a bed. 
• An EEG technician will be in the room and will explain the test to you and your child. 
• The technician will measure your child’s head and make small marks on the scalp with a washable marker or pen. 
• Each marked area will be rubbed gently with a gritty lotion that helps the electrodes work better.   
• A mild glue that can be removed later will be put on the electrodes and the electrodes will be placed on each of the marks made on your child’s scalp.
• The electrodes will then be connected to the EEG machine and the test will begin. 
• During the test, your child should lie as still as possible. 
• At times, your child may be asked to breathe fast, to look at flashing lights and to try to sleep.

A video EEG is done much the same way, but it takes longer and your child is videotaped for a long period of time.

• A video EEG is often done at the hospital.
• Your child will be asked to sit in a chair or lie on a bed.

A Parent’s/Guardian’s Role During the Test

We welcome your help and support during this test. One parent or guardian is invited to stay with your child in the room during the EEG.  Other adults and children must stay in the waiting area.

• The most important role of a parent or guardian during the EEG is to help your child stay calm and relaxed. 
• The best way to help your child stay calm is for you to stay calm.
• We encourage you to talk to your child for reassurance during the EEG.
• Video EEGs can be boring for children, so you may want to bring an ipad, computers, books to read, toys or quiet games to play, or a favorite DVD for your child to watch.  These things will help the time go by faster. 

After the Test

Once the test is over:

• The electrodes will be removed from your child’s scalp and the glue will be washed off with warm water and a washcloth. If all of the glue doesn’t come off at first, you may need to wash your child’s hair at home.  
• The technician or a nurse will give you further instructions and tell you when you and your child may leave. 
• A pediatric neurology doctor will look at and interpret the EEG, and a report of your child’s EEG will be sent to the doctor who ordered it. If the results are urgent, the referring doctor will be contacted immediately.
• Please contact the doctor who ordered the test for the results.

Special Needs

If your child has any special needs or health issues you feel the doctor or technician performing the test needs to know about, please call our office  before the test and ask to speak with a nurse. It is important to notify us in advance about any special needs.

printable pdf here

I found this site while searching for video eeg patient information and explanations online. While the masked tech is scarier than the ones in my office, the site explains the procedure for parents. I would not use this site for an anxious young child. JR


Welcome to Kids
Video EEG Guide Online


Some kids need to have a test called Video EEG Monitoring. This picture guide and information will help caregivers and patients see what it is like and answer some basic questions. It is designed by a Child Life Specialist. If your Video EEG Center or Epilepsy Monitoring Unit has one working there, please feel free to talk to them about how to make the experience better for both patients and caregivers.




http://www.kidsvideoeeg.com/index.html