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Bioinformaatioteknologia
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Sähkötekniikan korkeakoulu |
Bachelor's thesis
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ELEC3016
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fi
Pages
26
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Abstract
Early identification of subclinical anxiety could open the door to affordable preventive interventions, but current screening is almost exclusively based on self-reports.
This bachelor’s thesis explored whether brief game-based assessments of executive function and behavioral criticality produce digital markers that predict subclinical anxiety. Sixteen healthy young adults completed two 10-minute computer games: Game 1 required discovering and flexibly updating a hidden rule, acting as an operationalization for cognitive flexibility. Game 2 displayed the rule continuously and therefore imposed minimal executive load, operationalizing task efficiency. Continuous mouse trajectories were recorded with a sampling rate of 60 Hz and long-range temporal correlations were quantified with multivariate detrended fluctuation analysis as a proxy for behavioral criticality. Traditional neuropsychological tests for executive function and the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7) questionnaire provided convergent measures.
Neither total game scores nor detrended fluctuation analysis exponents were significantly correlated with GAD-7 ratings. A nonsignificant trend suggested that higher anxiety was accompanied by better task efficiency in Game 2 and slightly reduced exponents of detrended fluctuation analysis, echoing theories of hypervigilant motor readiness but contradicting expectations of executive function impairment. Statistical power was limited by the small sample and the influence of a single high
anxiety outlier.
The findings indicate that the present 10-minute game battery, in its current form, does not yet provide sensitive behavioral biomarkers of subclinical anxiety. However, the methodological framework, which combines ecologically valid gameplay with dynamic and continuous motor analytics, remains promising. Future work should increase the sample size, extend the gameplay to avoid ceiling effects, incorporate adaptive difficulty, and triangulate motor signals with concurrent physiological measures to refine the digital phenotyping of early-stage anxiety.