Methods Participants Forty healthy volunteers, native speakers of Hebrew, were recruited for the study. Exclusion criteria were any current or past history of major physical or mental illness, of neurological disease or substance abuse and any history of head trauma causing loss of consciousness. All but one participant were right handed; all signed an informed consent form (appendix 2), an experimental protocol (appendix 12) and a metal screening questionnaire (appendix 13) that was approved by the ethical committee of the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center. All subjects were trained to perform the task outside the magnet and after confirming that they understood the task and are willing to participate in the scanning experiment, they entered the magnet. The participants received 160 + reimbursement for their participation in the study. Fifteen participants were excluded from the final analysis: three due to technical problems (1 participant from the EE version and 2 from FM version); eight participants were excluded because their memory score was not significantly higher than chance (1 participant from the EE version and 7 from FM version; see procedure section below) and an additional 4 subjects were excluded due to unreliable imaging data (1 participant from the EE version and 3 from FM version; see preprocessing and data analysis section below). Thus, for the statistical analysis, 25 participants were included: thirteen participants who performed the FM paradigm and twelve who performed the EE paradigm. Of these participants, 15 were males and 10 females, their mean age 26.64 (SD=3.41). No significant difference was found neither in the age of the participants in the FM (M=25.38, SD=2.36) and EE paradigms (M=28.09, SD=3.93) [t(23) =2.03, ns], nor in the gender distribution [(1) =0.03, ns].
Methods Participants Forty healthy volunteers, native speakers of Hebrew, were recruited for the study. Exclusion criteria were any current or past history of major physical or mental illness, of neurological disease or substance abuse and any history of head trauma causing loss of consciousness. All but one participant were right handed; all signed an informed consent form (appendix 2), an experimental protocol (appendix 12) and a metal screening questionnaire (appendix 13) that was approved by the ethical committee of the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center. All subjects were trained to perform the task outside the magnet and after confirming that they understood the task and are willing to participate in the scanning experiment, they entered the magnet. The participants received 160 + reimbursement for their participation in the study. Fifteen participants were excluded from the final analysis: three due to technical problems (1 participant from the EE version and 2 from FM version); eight participants were excluded because their memory score was not significantly higher than chance (1 participant from the EE version and 7 from FM version; see procedure section below) and an additional 4 subjects were excluded due to unreliable imaging data (1 participant from the EE version and 3 from FM version; see preprocessing and data analysis section below). Thus, for the statistical analysis, 25 participants were included: thirteen participants who performed the FM paradigm and twelve who performed the EE paradigm. Of these participants, 15 were males and 10 females, their mean age 26.64 (SD=3.41). No significant difference was found neither in the age of the participants in the FM (M=25.38, SD=2.36) and EE paradigms (M=28.09, SD=3.93) [t(23) =2.03, ns], nor in the gender distribution [(1) =0.03, ns].
PhD_V1_AG_final.docx