Influencia de Los Niveles de Alerta en el Aprendizaje Motor de Una Tarea Manual Precisa, en la Memoria a Corto y Largo Plazo y en la Capacidad de Imaginación Motora

In order to meet the study objectives of determining and quantifying the effects of arousal levels on learning a precise manual task and on motor imagery ability, this study will be conducted. The development of the study will take place in a conditioned room belonging to the University of Alcala, the Complutense University of Madrid, or the European University of Madrid. The study may also be carried out in other Spanish and international university centers, subject to the consent and permission of the respective centres. The study will be carried out by all national and international laws, regulations, and recommendations.

The study design will be longitudinal, experimental, randomized, and double-blind, as specified in the present registry.

The study population will be composed of participants who are undergraduate and postgraduate students at the university centers where the study will be carried out, from which the participants will be recruited. All participants included in the study must meet the study selection criteria and participate voluntarily after reading the information sheet and signing the informed consent form.

The study will consist of three intervention groups, in which low, medium, or high arousal will be induced, respectively. Each group will consist of a minimum number of 30 subjects to be able to study the desired effect.

After each participant freely chooses to participate in the study, an initial questionnaire will be administered to ensure that each participant meet the criteria for inclusion in the study. At this point, the participant will be coded and assigned a number, which will serve as identification throughout the study. Participants will take the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), one of the most widely used instruments for the self-reported assessment of anxiety and equivalent to a measure of stress, as it considers the amount of stressful stimulus. Thus, the two components of anxiety will be assessed: state anxiety and trait anxiety. Participants with scores indicative of state or trait anxiety will be excluded from the study, and those with scores indicating neither trait anxiety nor state anxiety will be included. Included participants will be randomized through sealed envelopes stratified by gender to one of three experimental groups: low arousal, medium arousal, and high arousal. Participants will also take the Movement Imagery Questionnaire-3 (MIQ-3) to measure internal visual, external visual, kinaesthetic imagery ability, and the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory (EHI) to determine the participant's laterality. Depending on the group to which participants have been assigned, participants will be visualize a series of International Affective Picture System (IAPS) images that will induce the different states of arousal. The IAPS is one of the most widely used standardized emotion-eliciting stimulus sets in experimental research and has been shown to produce reliable and measurable changes in all three emotional response systems in the study population of this study: subjective-verbal, behavioral and physiological. After visualizing the images, participants will learn a precise manual task with the non-dominant hand. The task will consist of going over a 127 mm circumference on a graphics tablet at a rate of 2 seconds per lap, which will be set by a metronome using a wireless pen that will leave no trace of ink but will store the data in the MATLAB program via the graphics tablet. Thus, data from the learning process and short-term memory of the task will be recorded. Afterward, there will be a 20-minute break during which participants will perform the MIQ-3 again. Finally, the task data will be collected to record the long-term memory of the manual task.