Participant Sex
participant sex
Neuromodulation of subjective experience
Many psychoactive substances are used with the aim of altering experience, e.g. as analgesics, antidepressants or antipsychotics. These drugs act on specific receptor systems in the brain, including the opioid, serotonergic and dopaminergic systems. In this talk, I will summarise human drug studies targeting opioid receptors and their role for human experience, with focus on the experience of pain, stress, mood, and social connection. Opioids are only indicated for analgesia, due to their potential to cause addiction. When these regulations occurred, other known effects were relegated to side effects. This may be the cause of the prevalent myth that opioids are the most potent painkillers, despite evidence from head-to-head trials, Cochrane reviews and network meta-analyses that opioids are not superior to non-opioid analgesics in the treatment of acute or chronic non-cancer pain. However, due to the variability and diversity of opioid effects across contexts and experiences, some people under some circumstances may indeed benefit from prolonged treatment. I will present data on individual differences in opioid effects due to participant sex and stress induction. Understanding the effects of these commonly used medications on other aspects of the human experience is important to ensure correct use and to prevent unnecessary pain and addiction risk.
NMC4 Short Talk: What can 140,000 Reaches Tell Us About Demographic Contributions to Visuomotor Adaptation?
Motor learning is typically assessed in the lab, affording a high degree of control over the task environment. However, this level of control often comes at the cost of smaller sample sizes and a homogenous pool of participants (e.g. college students). To address this, we have designed a web-based motor learning experiment, making it possible to reach a larger, more diverse set of participants. As a proof-of-concept, we collected 1,581 participants completing a visuomotor rotation task, where participants controlled a visual cursor on the screen with their mouse and trackpad. Motor learning was indexed by how fast participants were able to compensate for a 45° rotation imposed between the cursor and their actual movement. Using a cross-validated LASSO regression, we found that motor learning varied significantly with the participant’s age and sex, and also strongly correlated with the location of the target, visual acuity, and satisfaction with the experiment. In contrast, participants' mouse and browser type were features eliminated by the model, indicating that motor performance was not influenced by variations in computer hardware and software. Together, this proof-of-concept study demonstrates how large datasets can generate important insights into the factors underlying motor learning.