Clinical trial NCT03832101: Improvement of Facial Recognition Ability and Multitasking
Official title: Improvement of Facial Recognition Ability and Multitasking
Study type: INTERVENTIONAL
Overall status: UNKNOWN
Phase: NA
Conditions: Facial Discrimination
Multitasking
Lead sponsor: National University of Singapore
Sponsor class: OTHER
First posted: 2019-02-06
Enrollment: 100
Sex: ALL
Minimum age (years): 21
Maximum age (years): 40
Standard ages: ADULT
Accepts healthy volunteers: yes
Allocation: RANDOMIZED
Intervention model: PARALLEL
Primary purpose: BASIC_SCIENCE

Brief summary: This study aims to determine the efficacy of training on facial recognition and multitasking. The researchers hypothesize that participants who have undergone facial recognition and multitasking training will demonstrate an improved facial recognition ability and performance in multi-tasking. The researchers also hypothesize that measures of sustained and selective attention will predict performance on multitasking tasks. This work sets the ground work for future research into if and how facial recognition and multitasking ability can be improved.

Detailed description: There has been evidence showing improvements on performance on various cognitive tasks after training, but evidence on multitasking and facial recognition is lacking. Both multi-tasking and facial recognition are crucial for military and law enforcement personnel, and the respective organizations can consider these abilities during their respective recruitment and training processes.

This study will test whether training on multi-tasking and facial recognition tasks can improve an individual's performance. Additionally, it will test whether their performance on other measures of attention and multitasking can predict changes post-training.

Participants will go through 5 testing sessions span over 5 days. For each session, participants will complete a multitasking task and a facial recognition task. Participants are hypothesized to improve in their performance after 5 consecutive days of training on these 2 tasks. Additionally, participants will also complete 2 attention tasks, 1 face memory task, and 1 other multi-tasking task only on the first day. Both multitasking tasks are expected to correlate at baseline, and performance on the attention tasks may predict performance on multitasking tasks as these tasks require sustained and selective attention. A face memory task will also be used to account for each individual's baseline facial recognition ability.

Eligibility criteria: Inclusion Criteria:

* Participants must be over 21 if they are not from NUS or Yale-NUS. NUS or Yale-NUS students over 18 can also participate. All participants are expected to be fluent in English.

Exclusion Criteria:

* Participants with a history of perceptual or memory deficit will be excluded.

Primary outcomes:
measure: Facial recognition performance change during training
timeFrame: Day 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
measure: Multi-tasking performance change during training
timeFrame: Day 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Secondary outcomes:
Other outcomes:
Locations:
city: Singapore
country: Singapore
facility: National University of Singapore
Study officials:
References: