Publications by authors named "H Stecher"
Estuaries often experience multiple water quality impairments including nitrogen enrichment and elevated fecal pollution. These pollutant sources are often linked and difficult to characterize, especially in multiple use watersheds, hindering the identification of effective mitigation steps. Tillamook Bay (Oregon, USA) has a mixed-use watershed including many potential nutrient and fecal bacteria sources due to agricultural activities, human development, and local wildlife populations.
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- Transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) is a non-invasive method that influences brain activity, particularly affecting a certain area called the locus coeruleus (LC), but its optimal usage and results remain unclear.
- A study involving 29 healthy young participants compared the effects of short (3.4 seconds) and long (30 seconds) taVNS on various measures, including saliva, pupil responses, and EEG data, in a double-blind, sham-controlled design.
- Results showed that longer stimulation raised salivary alpha-amylase levels, while shorter stimulation led to slower reaction times and more errors in cognitive tasks, suggesting complex and unexpected effects of taVNS on brain function.
This review aims to demonstrate the connections between event-related potentials (ERPs), event-related oscillations (EROs), and non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS), with a specific focus on transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS). We begin with a short examination and discussion of the relation between ERPs and EROs. Then, we investigate the diverse fields of NIBS, highlighting tACS as a potent tool for modulating neural oscillations and influencing cognitive performance.
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- Scientists studied older people to see if a special brain stimulation could help them react faster during a task.
- They used different types of stimulation, including one that makes brain waves at 40 Hz and compared it to a fake one and a slower one.
- The results showed that while everyone got slower over time, the 40 Hz group didn't improve as much as expected, and the brain activity changes were similar for all groups.
It is often necessary to modulate the difficulty of an experimental task without changing physical stimulus characteristics that are known to modulate event-related potentials. Here, we developed a new, oddball-like visual discrimination task with varying levels of difficulty despite using almost identical visual stimuli. Gabor patches of one orientation served as frequent standard stimuli with 75% probability.
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