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Biological Psychiatry. Cognitive... Sep 2019The strategy of integrating motor signals with sensory information during voluntary behavior is a general feature of sensory processing. It is required to distinguish... (Review)
Review
The strategy of integrating motor signals with sensory information during voluntary behavior is a general feature of sensory processing. It is required to distinguish externally applied (exafferent) from self-generated (reafferent) sensory inputs. This distinction, in turn, underlies our ability to achieve both perceptual stability and accurate motor control during everyday activities. In this review, we consider the results of recent experiments that have provided circuit-level insight into how motor-related inputs to sensory areas selectively cancel self-generated sensory inputs during active behaviors. These studies have revealed both common strategies and important differences across systems. Sensory reafference is suppressed at the earliest stages of central processing in the somatosensory, vestibular, and auditory systems, with the cerebellum and cerebellum-like structures playing key roles. Furthermore, motor-related inputs can also suppress reafferent responses at higher levels of processing such as the cortex-a strategy preferentially used in visual processing. These recent findings have important implications for understanding how the brain achieves the flexibility required to continuously calibrate relationships between motor signals and the resultant sensory feedback, a computation necessary for our subjective awareness that we control both our actions and their sensory consequences.
Topics: Brain; Cerebellum; Feedback, Sensory; Humans; Models, Neurological; Perception; Psychomotor Performance
PubMed: 31401034
DOI: 10.1016/j.bpsc.2019.06.003 -
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews Apr 2023Living in a social world requires social monitoring, i.e., the ability to keep track of others' actions and mistakes. Here, we demonstrate the good reliability of the... (Review)
Review
Living in a social world requires social monitoring, i.e., the ability to keep track of others' actions and mistakes. Here, we demonstrate the good reliability of the behavioral and neurophysiological indexes ascribed to social monitoring. We also show that no consensus exists on the cognitive bases of this phenomenology and discuss three alternative hypotheses: (i) the direct matching hypothesis, postulating that observed errors are processed through automatic simulation; (ii) the attentional hypothesis, considering errors as unexpected events that take resources away from task processing; and (iii) the goal representation hypothesis, which weighs social error monitoring depending on how relevant the other's task is to the observer's goals. To date, evidence on the role played by factors that could help to disentangle these hypotheses (e.g., the human vs. non-human nature of the actor, the error rate, and the reward context) is insufficient, although the goal representation hypothesis seems to receive more support. Theory-driven experimental designs are needed to enlighten this debate and clarify the role of error monitoring during interactive exchanges.
Topics: Humans; Interpersonal Relations; Reproducibility of Results; Social Environment; Psychomotor Performance
PubMed: 36758826
DOI: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2023.105077 -
NeuroImage Feb 2021The human brain has undergone massive expansion across primate evolution through life amidst multi-layered social attachments; within families, among friends, and...
The human brain has undergone massive expansion across primate evolution through life amidst multi-layered social attachments; within families, among friends, and between clan members and this enabled humans to coordinate their brains with those of others toward the execution of complex social goals. We examined how human attachments facilitate efficient, resource-sensitive performance of social goals by balancing neural and behavioral synchrony. Using hyperscanning EEG, we collected neural data from male-female pairs in three groups (N=158, 79 pairs); long-term couples, best friends, and unfamiliar group members, during two ecologically-valid naturalistic tasks; motor coordination and empathy giving. Across groups and tasks, neural synchrony was supported by behavior coordination and orchestrated multiple neural rhythms. In the goal-directed motor task, interbrain synchrony implicated beta and gamma rhythms localized to sensorimotor areas. Couples showed the highest neural synchrony combined with greatest behavioral synchrony and such brain-behavior linkage resulted in speedy performance, conserving energy in the long run. The socially-oriented empathy task triggered neural synchrony in widely-distributed sensorimotor and bilateral temporal regions, integrated alpha, beta, and gamma rhythms, and implicated brain-behavior complementarity; couples displayed the highest behavioral synchrony combined with lowest neural synchrony toward greatest felt support while strangers exhibited the opposite pattern. Findings suggest that human attachments provide a familiar backdrop of temporal regularities, required for the brain's allostatic function, and interbrain and behavioral synchrony are sculpted by familiarity and closeness toward resource-sensitive performance of survival-related social goals, toiled by two.
Topics: Adult; Brain; Electroencephalography; Empathy; Female; Humans; Male; Psychomotor Performance; Social Interaction; Young Adult
PubMed: 33249213
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.117600 -
Journal of Neurophysiology May 2021People's eyes are directed at objects of interest with the aim of acquiring visual information. However, processing this information is constrained in capacity,... (Review)
Review
People's eyes are directed at objects of interest with the aim of acquiring visual information. However, processing this information is constrained in capacity, requiring task-driven and salience-driven attentional mechanisms to select few among the many available objects. A wealth of behavioral and neurophysiological evidence has demonstrated that visual selection and the motor selection of saccade targets rely on shared mechanisms. This coupling supports the premotor theory of visual attention put forth more than 30 years ago, postulating visual selection as a necessary stage in motor selection. In this review, we examine to which extent the coupling of visual and motor selection observed with saccades is replicated during ocular tracking. Ocular tracking combines catch-up saccades and smooth pursuit to foveate a moving object. We find evidence that ocular tracking requires visual selection of the speed and direction of the moving target, but the position of the motion signal may not coincide with the position of the pursuit target. Further, visual and motor selection can be spatially decoupled when pursuit is initiated (open-loop pursuit). We propose that a main function of coupled visual and motor selection is to serve the coordination of catch-up saccades and pursuit eye movements. A simple race-to-threshold model is proposed to explain the variable coupling of visual selection during pursuit, catch-up and regular saccades, while generating testable predictions. We discuss pending issues, such as disentangling visual selection from preattentive visual processing and response selection, and the pinpointing of visual selection mechanisms, which have begun to be addressed in the neurophysiological literature.
Topics: Attention; Eye-Tracking Technology; Humans; Psychomotor Performance; Saccades; Visual Perception
PubMed: 33730516
DOI: 10.1152/jn.00145.2019 -
Scientific Reports Feb 2023Previous studies suggest that humans are capable of coregulating the speed of decisions and movements if promoted by task incentives. It is unclear however whether such...
Previous studies suggest that humans are capable of coregulating the speed of decisions and movements if promoted by task incentives. It is unclear however whether such behavior is inherent to the process of translating decisional information into movements, beyond posing a valid strategy in some task contexts. Therefore, in a behavioral online study we imposed time constraints to either decision- or movement phases of a sensorimotor task, ensuring that coregulating decisions and movements was not promoted by task incentives. We found that participants indeed moved faster when fast decisions were promoted and decided faster when subsequent finger tapping movements had to be executed swiftly. These results were further supported by drift diffusion modelling and inspection of psychophysical kernels: Sensorimotor delays related to initiating the finger tapping sequence were shorter in fast-decision as compared to slow-decision blocks. Likewise, the decisional speed-accuracy tradeoff shifted in favor of faster decisions in fast-tapping as compared to slow-tapping blocks. These findings suggest that decisions not only impact movement characteristics, but that properties of movement impact the time taken to decide. We interpret these behavioral results in the context of embodied decision-making, whereby shared neural mechanisms may modulate decisions and movements in a joint fashion.
Topics: Humans; Psychomotor Performance; Reaction Time; Movement
PubMed: 36841847
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-30325-4 -
Journal of Neurophysiology Jan 2023Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that has noted alterations to motor performance and coordination, potentially affecting...
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that has noted alterations to motor performance and coordination, potentially affecting learning processes and the acquisition of motor skills. This work will provide insight into the role of altered neural processing and sensorimotor integration (SMI) while learning a novel visuomotor task in young adults with ADHD. This work compared adults with ADHD ( = 12) to neurotypical controls ( = 16), using a novel visuomotor tracing task, where participants used their right-thumb to trace a sinusoidal waveform that varied in both frequency and amplitude. This learning paradigm was completed in pre, acquisition, and post blocks, where participants additionally returned and completed a retention and transfer test 24 h later. Right median nerve short latency somatosensory-evoked potentials (SEPs) were collected pre and post motor acquisition. Performance accuracy and variability improved at post and retention measures for both groups for both normalized ( < 0.001) and absolute ( < 0.001) performance scores. N18 SEP: increased in the ADHD group post motor learning and decreased in controls ( < 0.05). N20 SEP: increased in both groups post motor learning ( < 0.01). P25: increased in both groups post motor learning ( < 0.001). N24: increased for both groups at post measures ( < 0.05). N30: decreased in the ADHD group and increased in controls ( < 0.05). These findings suggest that there may be differences in cortico-cerebellar and prefrontal processing in response to novel visuomotor tasks in those with ADHD. Alterations to somatosensory-evoked potentials (SEPs) were present in young adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), when compared with neurotypical controls. The N18 and N30 SEP peak had differential changes between groups, suggesting alterations to olivary-cerebellar-M1 processing and SMI in those with ADHD when acquiring a novel visuomotor tracing task. This suggests that short-latency SEPs may be a useful biomarker in the assessment of differential responses to motor acquisition in those with ADHD.
Topics: Humans; Young Adult; Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity; Psychomotor Performance; Motor Skills; Learning; Thumb; Electroencephalography
PubMed: 36448686
DOI: 10.1152/jn.00173.2022 -
PloS One 2020The social interactions that we experience from early infancy often involve actions that are not strictly instrumental but engage the recipient by eliciting a...
The social interactions that we experience from early infancy often involve actions that are not strictly instrumental but engage the recipient by eliciting a (complementary) response. Interactive gestures may have privileged access to our perceptual and motor systems either because of their intrinsically engaging nature or as a result of extensive social learning. We compared these two hypotheses in a series of behavioral experiments by presenting individuals with interactive gestures that call for motor responses to complement the interaction ('hand shaking', 'requesting', 'high-five') and with communicative gestures that are equally socially relevant and salient, but do not strictly require a response from the recipient ('Ok', 'Thumbs up', 'Peace'). By means of a spatial compatibility task, we measured the interfering power of these task-irrelevant stimuli on the behavioral responses of individuals asked to respond to a target. Across three experiments, our results showed that the interactive gestures impact on response selection and reduce spatial compatibility effects as compared to the communicative (non-interactive) gestures. Importantly, this effect was independent of the activation of specific social scripts that may interfere with response selection. Overall, our results show that interactive gestures have privileged access to our perceptual and motor systems, possibly because they entail an automatic preparation to respond that involuntary engages the motor system of the observers. We discuss the implications from a developmental and neurophysiological point of view.
Topics: Adult; Female; Functional Laterality; Gestures; Humans; Interpersonal Relations; Male; Motion Perception; Psychomotor Performance; Space Perception; Visual Perception; Young Adult
PubMed: 32324834
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0232128 -
Scientific Reports Apr 2022Many daily activities require performance of multiple tasks integrating cognitive and motor processes. While the fact that both processes go through deterioration and...
Many daily activities require performance of multiple tasks integrating cognitive and motor processes. While the fact that both processes go through deterioration and changes with aging has been generally accepted, not much is known about how aging interacts with stages of motor skill acquisition under a cognitively demanding situation. To address this question, we combined a visuomotor adaptation task with a secondary cognitive task. We made two primary findings beyond the expected age-related performance deterioration. First, while young adults showed classical dual-task cost in the early motor learning phase dominated by explicit processes, older adults instead strikingly displayed enhanced performance in the later stage, dominated by implicit processes. For older adults, the secondary task may have facilitated a shift to their relatively intact implicit learning processes that reduced reliance on their already-deficient explicit processes during visuomotor adaptation. Second, we demonstrated that consistently performing the secondary task in learning and re-learning phases can operate as an internal task-context and facilitate visuomotor memory retrieval later regardless of age groups. Therefore, our study demonstrated age-related similarities and differences in integrating concurrent cognitive load with motor skill acquisition which, may in turn, contributes to the understanding of a shift in balance across multiple systems.
Topics: Adaptation, Physiological; Aged; Aging; Humans; Learning; Motor Skills; Psychomotor Performance; Young Adult
PubMed: 35383212
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-09553-7 -
PloS One 2023The ability to perform an unrehearsed piece of music, or sight-read, is a skill required by music performers. In sight-reading, the performer reads and plays the music...
The ability to perform an unrehearsed piece of music, or sight-read, is a skill required by music performers. In sight-reading, the performer reads and plays the music simultaneously, which requires the coordination of visual, auditory, and motor processing. While performing, they display a characteristic called eye-hand span, in which the part of the score being looked at precedes the part being played. They must recognize, decipher, and process the score in the time between reading a note and playing it. An individual's executive function (EF) that control their cognition, emotions, and behavior may be involved in overseeing these individual movements. However, no study has investigated how EF is related to the eye-hand span and performance during sight-reading. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to clarify the relationships among EF, eye-hand span, and piano performance. Thirty-nine Japanese pianists and college students aspiring to be pianists with an average of 33.3 years of experience participated in this study. They performed sight-reading of two types of music scores with different difficulty levels while their eye movements were measured using an eye tracker to obtain their eye-hand span. The core EFs of inhibition, working memory, and shifting, were measured directly for each participant. Piano performance was evaluated by two pianists who did not participate in the study. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the results. The results showed that auditory working memory predicted eye-hand span (β = .73, p < .001 in easy score; β = .65, p < .001 in difficult score), and eye-hand span predicted performance (β = .57, p < .001 in easy score; β = .56, p < .001 in difficult score). Auditory working memory did not directly affect performance, but through eye-hand span. The eye-hand span for easy scores was significantly greater than that for difficult scores. Furthermore, in a difficult music score, the shifting ability predicted higher piano performance. These suggest that the input of notes from the eyes becomes sound in the brain and activates the auditory working memory, which is then transmitted to finger movement, resulting in piano performance. In addition, it was suggested that shifting ability is also needed to perform difficult scores.
Topics: Humans; Psychomotor Performance; Executive Function; Hand; Fingers; Eye Movements; Music
PubMed: 37130133
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0285043 -
Behaviour Research and Therapy May 2020Worry has been experimentally linked to a range of cognitive consequences, including impairments in working memory, inhibition, and cognitive control. However, findings...
Worry has been experimentally linked to a range of cognitive consequences, including impairments in working memory, inhibition, and cognitive control. However, findings are mixed, and the effects of worry on other phenomenologically-relevant constructs, such as sustained attention, have received less attention. Potential confounds such as speed-accuracy tradeoffs have also received little attention, as have psychometric and related design considerations, and potential moderators beyond trait worry. The present study investigated the effects of experimentally-induced worry versus a neutral control condition on speed-accuracy tradeoff-corrected performance on a validated measure of sustained attention (88 participants; within-subjects). Moderation by trait worry and trait mindfulness was probed in confirmatory and exploratory analyses, respectively. Worry led to faster and less accurate responding relative to the neutral comparison condition. There was no main effect of condition or trait worry on sustained attention after accounting for speed-accuracy tradeoffs. In exploratory analyses, higher trait mindfulness was robustly related to better post-worry performance, including after controlling for trait worry, general distress, and post-neutral performance, and correction for multiple comparisons. Follow-up analyses exploring dissociable mindfulness facets found a robust relationship between present-moment attention and post-worry performance. Future research should experimentally manipulate mindfulness facets to probe causality and inform treatment development.
Topics: Adolescent; Anxiety; Attention; Cognition; Female; Humans; Inhibition, Psychological; Male; Memory, Short-Term; Mindfulness; Personality; Psychological Distress; Psychomotor Performance; Reaction Time; Young Adult
PubMed: 32217356
DOI: 10.1016/j.brat.2020.103597