Lorazepam Effects on Cognition – Virtual Reality (LOR-VR)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rationale: Benzodiazepines (BZDs) are a frequently prescribed class of psychoactive drugs known for their sedative, anxiolytic, and hypnotic effects. Many clinical conditions, including seizures, anxiety disorders, and insomnia, are treated with them. BZDs increase the effects of the primary inhibiting neurotransmitter, GABA (Sigel, 2002). Chloride ions enter neurons in greater quantities as a result of this interaction. This leads to a reduction in neuronal activity due to neuronal hyperpolarization. In a recent review (Kloft et al., 2021), it was shown that knowledge on how substances other than alcohol and cannabis affect false memory and suggestibility is still scarce, and that ecologically valid research separating the three basic memory phases of encoding, consolidation, and retrieval and their susceptibility to relevant drugs is urgently needed. The misuse of these drugs poses significant challenges, particularly with regard to criminal behavior. BZDs play a significant role in criminal activity, both as facilitators of criminal behavior and as contributors to impaired judgment and cognition (Lethbridge, 2020; Vincenti et al., 2021). Objective: The study explores how BZDs may affect attention, the formation of memory and suggestion receptivity. By using virtual reality (VR) technology to create realistic crime scenes, subjects are able to immerse themselves in the role of the perpetrator. By using VR glasses with eye-tracking technology, oculomotor behaviors can be measured to gain information about attention patterns and to which extent BZD-induced memory impairments can be attributed to attentional deficits. A sample of N=120 healthy volunteers will be required to complete this study. Four groups of healthy volunteers (n=30 per group) will receive lorazepam vs. placebo at different timepoints (encoding, consolidation, and retrieval). Participants will visit the lab twice. Both testing days will include completion of questionnaires and cognitive tasks. Primary measures are the applied memory task of the VR scenario, and the flanker task. Secondary measures are an emotional spontaneous false memory task (the Deese-Roediger/McDermott or DRM paradigm), the GSS, the blind implantation paradigm, the VAS, the PANAS, the STAI-T, and the telepresence scale. In addition, test day two will include the completion of an Eriksen flanker task. Previous studies have shown benzodiazepine effects on attentional focus. In this study, we apply drift diffusion models to an extended version of the task to model underlying attentional processes and to extend our understanding of GABAergic involvement in attention.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".