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Q19 - Respiratory Phase and Memory Performance

Theoretical 2 Real exam question - full text reproduced under IBO's CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license
Nervous System Physiology

In a recognition memory task, subjects (human being) viewed a series of different visual objects that occurred at different times within the breathing cycle. The interval between displaying images was 3-6 seconds. After a 20 min break, subjects were presented with the old pictures from the encoding session plus an equal number of new pictures; and the subjects pressed the “Yes” button if they had previously viewed the object’s image, and pressed the “No” button if the image was new. Subjects’ memory performance was examined in the episodes of inspiration and expiration, and in mouth breathing and nasal breathing (In figures “*” means p < 0.05 which indicates significant difference between groups).

Figure 1. Figure 1.

Using the information and data, determine which of the statements are true or which are false.

A. The inspiration and expiration phase does not affect memory performance during oral breathing.
B. Memory function during nasal breathing is significantly more accurate than during oral breathing.
C. Regardless of the respiratory phase in which the image is encoded, if the object's images are depicted in the inspiration phase during the retrieval, memory performance is significantly greater.
D. In breathing through the nose, unlike encoding, the accuracy of retrieval in the inspiration phase is significantly higher than in the expiration phase.
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Question reproduced from IBO 2018, Theoretical Paper 2, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 - attributed to the International Biology Olympiad. Open the full exam PDF · Community solutions (unofficial)