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Identifying Electrophysiological Components Of Covert Awareness In Patients With Disorders Of Consciousness, Geoffrey Laforge
Identifying Electrophysiological Components Of Covert Awareness In Patients With Disorders Of Consciousness, Geoffrey Laforge
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
Naturalistic stimuli evoke synchronous patterns of neural activity between individuals in sensory and higher cognitive, “executive” networks of the brain. fMRI paradigms developed to measure this inter-subject synchronization have been extended to test for executive processing in behaviourally non-responsive patients as a neural marker of awareness. This thesis adapted one such paradigm for use in EEG, a low-cost, portable neuroimaging technique that can be administered at a patient’s bedside. Healthy participants listened to a suspenseful auditory narrative during EEG recording. Significant inter-subject synchronization was found throughout the audio but was significantly reduced during a scrambled control condition. This paradigm was …
Decoding Mental States After Severe Brain Injury, Raechelle M. Gibson
Decoding Mental States After Severe Brain Injury, Raechelle M. Gibson
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
Some patients with disorders of consciousness retain sensory and cognitive abilities that are not apparent from their outward behaviour. It is crucial to identify and characterise these covert abilities for diagnosis, prognosis, and medical ethics. This thesis uses neuroimaging techniques to investigate cognitive preservation and awareness in patients who are behaviourally non-responsive due to acquired brain injuries. In the first chapter, a large sample of healthy volunteers, including experienced athletes and musicians, imagined actions of varying complexity and familiarity. Motor imagery involving certain complex, familiar actions correlated with a more robust sensorimotor rhythm. In the second chapter, several patients with …