Arterial Oxygen Desaturation Hinders Gamified Working Memory Performance.

Introduction: Hypoxia presents a physiological challenge to the Warfighters during military aviation and subterranean warfare operations by decreasing the supply of oxygen to the brain, which results in a reduced cognitive function depending on the magnitude and duration of hypoxic exposure. Moderate hypoxic exposures, fractions of inspired oxygen (FiO2) of 0.11 to 0.

Arterial oxygen desaturation during moderate hypoxia hinders sensorimotor performance.

Introduction: Moderate hypoxia may impact cognitive and sensorimotor performance prior to self-recognized impairments. Therefore, rapid and objective assessment tools to identify people at risk of impaired function during moderate hypoxia is needed.

Purpose: Test the hypothesis that reductions in arterial oxygen saturation during moderate normobaric hypoxia (FiO2 = 14%) decreases gamified sensorimotor performance as measured by alterations of motor acuity.

Gamified assessment of cognitive performance during moderate hypoxia.

Introduction: There is a need for rapid and objective assessment tools to identify people at risk of impaired cognitive function during hypoxia.

Purpose: To test the hypotheses that performance on gamified cognitive tests examining the cognitive domains of executive function (Gridshot), working memory (Capacity) and spatial tracking (Multitracker) will be reduced during normobaric exposure to moderate normobaric hypoxia.

Methods: Following three consecutive days of practice, twenty-one healthy adults (27 ± 5 y, 9 females) completed five 1-min rounds of the tablet-based games Gridshot, Capacity, and Multitracker (Statespace Labs, Inc.

Assessment of human expertise and movement kinematics in first-person shooter games.

In contrast to traditional professional sports, there are few standardized metrics in professional esports (competitive multiplayer video games) for assessing a player's skill and ability. We assessed the performance of professional-level players in Aim Lab, a first-person shooter training and assessment game, with two target-shooting tasks. These tasks differed primarily in target size: the task with large targets provided an incentive to be fast but imprecise and the task with large targets provided an incentive to be precise but slow.

Long-Term Motor Learning in the "Wild" With High Volume Video Game Data.

Motor learning occurs over long periods of practice during which motor acuity, the ability to execute actions more accurately, precisely, and in less time, improves. Laboratory-based studies of motor learning are typically limited to a small number of participants and a time frame of minutes to several hours per participant. There is a need to assess the generalizability of theories and findings from lab-based motor learning studies on larger samples and time scales.

Ancestry informative markers for distinguishing between Thai populations based on genome-wide association datasets.

The main purpose of this work was to identify a set of AIMs that stratify the genetic structure and diversity of the Thai population from a high-throughput autosomal genome-wide association study. In this study, more than one million SNPs from the international HapMap database and the Thai depression genome-wide association study have been examined to identify ancestry informative markers (AIMs) that distinguish between Thai populations. An efficient strategy is proposed to identify and characterize such SNPs and to test high-resolution SNP data from international HapMap populations.

Biases and errors on allele frequency estimation and disease association tests of next-generation sequencing of pooled samples.

Next-generation sequencing is widely used to study complex diseases because of its ability to identify both common and rare variants without prior single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) information. Pooled sequencing of implicated target regions can lower costs and allow more samples to be analyzed, thus improving statistical power for disease-associated variant detection. Several methods for disease association tests of pooled data and for optimal pooling designs have been developed under certain assumptions of the pooling process, for example, equal/unequal contributions to the pool, sequencing depth variation, and error rate.

Association between polymorphisms in catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) and cocaine-induced paranoia in European-American and African-American populations.

Catechol-O-methyltransferase (genetic locus, COMT) is a major enzyme involved in catecholamine metabolism and has been associated with numerous psychiatric phenotypes. We studied COMT SNPs and haplotypes in cocaine-induced paranoia (CIP) in African-American (AA) and European-American (EA) populations. We genotyped 17 SNPs across the COMT locus in 319 AA pedigrees (848 individuals) and 302 EA pedigrees (707 individuals).

Variation in NGFB is associated with primary affective disorders in women.

Affective disorders (AFDs) are highly comorbid with substance dependence (SD) and both are genetically influenced. However, the specific etiology of the comorbidity is not well understood. We genotyped an array of 1,350 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in or near 130 genes in 868 European-Americans (EAs), including 182 individuals with primary AFDs (PAFDs), 214 with SD comorbid with AFD (CAFD), and 472 screened controls.

Identification of population substructure among Jews using STR markers and dependence on reference populations included.

Background: Detecting population substructure is a critical issue for association studies of health behaviors and other traits. Whether inherent in the population or an artifact of marker choice, determining aspects of a population's genetic history as potential sources of substructure can aid in design of future genetic studies. Jewish populations, among which association studies are often conducted, have a known history of migrations.

Population admixture modulates risk for alcohol dependence.

The admixture of different ancestral populations in America may have important implications for the risk for psychiatric disorders, as it appears to have for other medical disorders. The present study investigated the role of population admixture in risk for several psychiatric disorders in European-Americans (EAs) and African-Americans (AAs). This is a multisite study with 3,792 subjects recruited from across the United States, including 3,119 EAs and 673 AAs.

Interpopulation linkage disequilibrium patterns of GABRA2 and GABRG1 genes at the GABA cluster locus on human chromosome 4.

GABRA2 and GABRG1, which encode the alpha-2 and gamma-1 subunits, respectively, of the GABA(A) receptor, are located in a cluster on chromosome 4p. The GABRA2 locus has been found to be associated with alcohol dependence in several studies, but no functional variant that can account for this association has been identified. To understand the reported associations, we sought to understand the linkage disequilibrium (LD) patterns and haplotype structures of these genes.

Sequence variation and linkage disequilibrium in the GABA transporter-1 gene (SLC6A1) in five populations: implications for pharmacogenetic research.

Background: GABA transporter-1 (GAT-1; genetic locus SLC6A1) is emerging as a novel target for treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders. To understand how population differences might influence strategies for pharmacogenetic studies, we identified patterns of genetic variation and linkage disequilibrium (LD) in SLC6A1 in five populations representing three continental groups.

Results: We resequenced 12.

Demographic changes and marker properties affect detection of human population differentiation.

Background: Differentiating genetically between populations is valuable for admixture and population stratification detection and in understanding population history. This is easy to achieve for major continental populations, but not for closely related populations. It has been claimed that a large marker panel is necessary to reliably distinguish populations within a continent.