ABSTRACT
Background: In life-threatening emergency events, prompt decision-making and accurate reactions are essential for saving a human's life. Some of these skills can be improved by regular simulation trainings. However, besides these factors, individual characteristics may play a significant role in the patients' outcome after a resuscitation event. This study aimed to differentiate personality characteristics of team members who take responsibility for their actions, contextualizing the effect of training on resuscitation performance. Methods: Six hundred and two third-year medical students were asked to answer psychological and personality questionnaires. Fifty-five of them performed in a neonatal simulation resuscitation scenario. To assess participants' performances in the NLS scenario, we used a scenario-based designed NLS checklist. A machine learning design was utilized to better understand the interaction of psychological characteristics and training. The first model aimed to understand how to differentiate between people who take responsibility for their actions vs. those who do not. In a second model, the goal was to understand the relevance of training by contextualizing the effect of training to other important psychological and personality characteristics like locus of control, anxiety, emotion regulation, openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Results: No statistically significant differences were found for psychological characteristics between the training group and the no training group. However, as expected, differences were noted in favor of the training group for performance and within gender for psychological characteristics. When correcting for all these information in a model, anxiety and gender were the most important factors associated with taking responsibility for an action, while training was the only relevant factor in explaining performance during a neonatal resuscitation scenario. Conclusion: Training had a significantly stronger effect on performance in medical students in a neonatal resuscitation scenario than individual characteristics such as demographics, personality, and trait anxiety.
ABSTRACT
In this study brain activity during motor imagery (MI) of joint actions, compared to single actions and rest conditions, was investigated using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first neuroimaging study which directly investigated the neural correlates of joint action motor imagery. Twenty-one healthy participants imagined three different motor tasks (dancing, carrying a box, wiping). Each imagery task was performed at two kinds: alone (single action MI) or with a partner (joint action MI). We hypothesized that to imagine a cooperative task would lead to a stronger cortical activation in motor related areas due to a higher vividness and intensification of the imagery. This would be elicited by the integration of the action simulation of the virtual partner to one's own action. Comparing the joint action and the single action condition with the rest condition, we found significant activation in the precentral gyrus and precuneus respectively. Furthermore the joint action MI showed higher activation patterns in the premotor cortex (inferior and middle frontal gyrus) compared to the single action MI. The imagery of a more vivid and engaging task, like our joint action imagery, could improve rehabilitation processes since a more distributed brain activity is found. Furthermore, the joint action imagery compared to single action imagery might be an appropriate BCI task due to its clear spatial distinction of activation.
