Studies are ongoing in defining valid paradigms for specific imaging and/or quantitative applications of the DH methods in biology: this requires efforts in comparative studies using a strict interdisciplinar cooperation between experts in life-science and optics.
Of central importance to our approach is the availability of valid behavioural paradigms for evaluating the potential efficacy of antidepressant drugs.
It allows for the design of more ecologically valid experimental paradigms and the investigation of questions that were hitherto very difficult to answer conclusively, and it also addresses the practical issue that certain attention experiments carried out using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have not been replicable in ERP designs.
In the present paradigm, valid trials indeed represent 50% of the non-neutral trials, as compared to 100% in the ANT studies.
We used an ecologically valid "reality-monitoring" paradigm in which participants performed, or imagined performing, specified actions with real objects drawn from one of two boxes.
These results cannot preclude that the broadening account is still valid for other paradigms, but they add to our evolutionary simulations (Heerebout & Phaf, 2010ab) and strengthen the notion (see also, Heerebout et al., 2013) that the modulation of flexibility is the most basic, and evolutionary early, effect of positive affect.
This paradigm produced valid data for laterality index (LI) calculations to determine the ratio of activity in each hemisphere.
The above-mentioned argument about the interdisciplinary nature of global health research – which should allow researchers from different disciplines to work and report within their own paradigm – remains valid, in my opinion.
Twenty-one schizophrenic patients (DSMIV), compared to 21 controls, performed a modified version of the Attention Network Task, in which an orienting paradigm (with valid, invalid and no cues) was combined with a flanker task (congruent/incongruent) and an alerting signal (tone/no tone), to assess orienting, executive control and alerting networks independently.
As already mentioned in the Introduction section, a further challenge for studies attempting to employ ecologically valid self-paced reading paradigms is a certain loss of experimental control.
