Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Role Of Affect And The Autonomic Nervous System (Ans) In Visuospatial Learning And Set-Shifting: Modulating Cardiac Vagal Tone Through Heart Rate Variability (Hrv) Biofeedback To Improve Cognitive Performance, Breannan C. Howell

Psychology ETDs

The fields of psychology and neuroscience have found an interconnection between the autonomic nervous system (ANS), affect, and cognitive performance. Heart rate variability (HRV) may be a useful index of this relationship, representing the regulatory processes that facilitate adapting to emotions and environments to modulate mood and executive function. The current project consists of a series of experiments to investigate the relationship between trait affect, HRV, learning, and set-shifting performance. In the first experiment associations are found between negative affectivity, HRV, and set-shifting performance during an attentional set-shifting variant of the Virtual Morris Water Task (VMWT). Participants that exhibited both …