Risky decisions are influenced by individual attributes as a function of risk preference.

It has long been assumed in economic theory that multi-attribute decisions involving several attributes or dimensions - such as probabilities and amounts of money to be earned during risky choices - are resolved by first combining the attributes of each option to form an overall expected value and then comparing the expected values of the alternative options, using a unique evidence accumulation process. A plausible alternative would be performing independent comparisons between the individual attributes and then integrating the results of the comparisons afterwards. Here, we devise a novel method to disambiguate between these types of models, by orthogonally manipulating the expected value of choice options and the relative salience of their attributes. Our results, based on behavioral measures and drift-diffusion models, provide evidence in favor of the framework where information about individual attributes independently impacts deliberation. This suggests that risky decisions are resolved by running in parallel multiple comparisons between the separate attributes - possibly alongside an additional comparison of expected value. This result stands in contrast with the assumption of standard economic theory that choices require a unique comparison of expected values and suggests that at the cognitive level, decision processes might be more distributed than commonly assumed. Beyond our planned analyses, we also discovered that attribute salience affects people of different risk preference type in different ways: risk-averse participants seem to focus more on probability, except when monetary amount is particularly high; risk-neutral/seeking participants, in contrast, seem to focus more on monetary amount, except when probability is particularly low.

Grip selection without tool knowledge: end-state comfort effect in familiar and novel tool use.

A well-known phenomenon for the study of movement planning is the end-state comfort (ESC) effect: When they reach and grasp tools, individuals tend to adopt uncomfortable initial hand postures if that allows a subsequent comfortable final posture. In the context of tool use, this effect is modulated by tool orientation, task goal, and cooperation. However, the cognitive bases of the ESC effect remain unclear. The goal of this study was to determine the contribution of semantic tool knowledge and technical reasoning to movement planning, by testing whether the ESC effect typically observed with familiar tools would also be observed with novel tools. Twenty-six participants were asked to reach and grasp familiar and novel tools under varying conditions (i.e., tool's handle downward vs. upward; tool transport vs. use; solo vs. cooperation). In our findings, the effects of tool orientation, task goal and cooperation were replicated with novel tools. It follows that semantic tool knowledge is not critical for the ESC effect to occur. In fact, we found an "habitual" effect: Participant adopted uncomfortable grips with familiar tools even when it was not necessary (i.e., to transport them), probably because of the interference of habitual movement programming with actual movement programming. A cognitive view of movement planning is proposed, according to which goal comprehension (1) may rely on semantic tool knowledge, technical reasoning, and/or social skills, (2) defines end-state configuration, which in turn (3) calibrates beginning-state comfort and hence the occurrence of the ESC effect.

An interoceptive illusion of effort induced by false heart-rate feedback.

Interoception, or the sense of the internal state of the body, is key to the adaptive regulation of our physiological needs. Recent theories contextualize interception within a predictive coding framework, according to which the brain both estimates and controls homeostatic and physiological variables, such as hunger, thirst, and effort levels, by orchestrating sensory, proprioceptive, and interoceptive signals from inside the body. This framework suggests that providing false interoceptive feedback may induce misperceptions of physiological variables, or "interoceptive illusions." Here we ask whether it is possible to produce an illusory perception of effort by giving participants false acoustic feedback about their heart-rate frequency during an effortful cycling task. We found that participants reported higher levels of perceived effort when their heart-rate feedback was faster compared with when they cycled at the same level of intensity with a veridical feedback. However, participants did not report lower effort when their heart-rate feedback was slower, which is reassuring, given that failing to notice one's own effort is dangerous in ecologically valid conditions. Our results demonstrate that false cardiac feedback can produce interoceptive illusions. Furthermore, our results pave the way for novel experimental manipulations that use illusions to study interoceptive processing.

Local high-frequency vibration therapy following eccentric exercises reduces muscle soreness perception and posture alterations in elite athletes.

PURPOSE: Exercise-induced muscle damage produces painful sensations (delayed onset of muscle soreness, DOMS). DOMS causes compensatory postural adaptations, which in turn affect athletes' walking and running gait biomechanics. It is still debated whether the postural changes are due to impaired proprioception or pain perception. To disambiguate between these two contrasting hypotheses, we designed a study that tested post-exercise postural adjustments in two groups of athletes: a group who was administered a vibration therapy (VT), to attenuate pain perception, and a control group. METHODS: Thirty professional futsal players were tested on five different occasions: baseline, eccentric exercises (EE) session day, 24, 48 and 72 h after EE. Vibration therapy (120 Hz) was applied on legs muscles for 15 min in the experimental group, while no vibration was applied in the control group. The measurements included: isokinetic evaluation, stabilometric test, perceived soreness evaluation and serum levels of creatine kinase, and lactate dehydrogenase. RESULTS: 48 h after EE, the control group showed changes in biomechanical parameters (antero-rotations of pelvis, p < 0.05). A substantial alteration in the hip kinematics was found, associated to a reduced contractile force (p < 0.01) and soreness perception. On the contrary, the VT group did not show any change in posture and pain perception. High-intensity VT decreases EE effects on muscle strength and DOMS. CONCLUSIONS: DOMS significantly changes athletes' posture; but postural changes disappear following a VT therapy that decreases pain perception. It is concluded that soreness perception is the main cause of postural changes and that its effects can be counteracted using VT therapy.

Avoiding Accidents at the Champagne Reception.

Using a lifting and balancing task, we contrasted two alternative views of planning joint actions: one postulating that joint action involves distinct predictions for self and other, the other postulating that joint action involves coordinated plans between the coactors and reuse of bimanual models. We compared compensatory movements required to keep a tray balanced when 2 participants lifted glasses from each other's trays at the same time (simultaneous joint action) and when they took turns lifting (sequential joint action). Compared with sequential joint action, simultaneous joint action made it easier to keep the tray balanced. Thus, in keeping with the view that bimanual models are reused for joint action, predicting the timing of their own lifting action helped participants compensate for another person's lifting action. These results raise the possibility that simultaneous joint actions do not necessarily require distinguishing between one's own and the coactor's contributions to the action plan and may afford an agent-neutral stance.

You cannot speak and listen at the same time: a probabilistic model of turn-taking.

Turn-taking is a preverbal skill whose mastering constitutes an important precondition for many social interactions and joint actions. However, the cognitive mechanisms supporting turn-taking abilities are still poorly understood. Here, we propose a computational analysis of turn-taking in terms of two general mechanisms supporting joint actions: action prediction (e.g., recognizing the interlocutor's message and predicting the end of turn) and signaling (e.g., modifying one's own speech to make it more predictable and discriminable). We test the hypothesis that in a simulated conversational scenario dyads using these two mechanisms can recognize the utterances of their co-actors faster, which in turn permits them to give and take turns more efficiently. Furthermore, we discuss how turn-taking dynamics depend on the fact that agents cannot simultaneously use their internal models for both action (or messages) prediction and production, as these have different requirements-or, in other words, they cannot speak and listen at the same time with the same level of accuracy. Our results provide a computational-level characterization of turn-taking in terms of cognitive mechanisms of action prediction and signaling that are shared across various interaction and joint action domains.

More gain less pain: balance control learning shifts the activation patterns of leg and neck muscles and increases muscular parsimony.

Athletes such as skaters or surfers maintain their balance on very unstable platforms. Remarkably, the most skilled athletes seem to execute these feats almost effortlessly. However, the dynamics that lead to the acquisition of a defined and efficient postural strategy are incompletely known. To understand the posture reorganization process due to learning and expertise, we trained twelve participants in a demanding balance/posture maintenance task for 4 months and measured their muscular activity before and after a (predictable) disturbance cued by an auditory signal. The balance training determined significant delays in the latency of participants' muscular activity: from largely anticipatory muscular activity (prior to training) to a mixed anticipatory-compensatory control strategy (after training). After training, the onset of activation was delayed for all muscles, and the sequence of activation systematically reflected the muscle position in the body from top to bottom: neck/upper body muscles were recruited first and in an anticipatory fashion, whereas leg muscles were recruited after the disturbance onset, producing compensatory adjustments. The resulting control strategy includes a mixture of anticipatory and compensatory postural adjustments, with a systematic sequence of muscular activation reflecting the different demands of neck and leg muscles. Our results suggest that subjects learned the precise timing of the disturbance onset and used this information to deploy postural adjustments just-in-time and to transfer at least part of the control of posture from anticipatory to less-demanding feedback-based strategies. In turn, this strategy shift increases the cost-efficiency of muscular activity, which is a key signature of skilled performance.

Self-regulation training improves stress resilience in elite pre-pubescent female gymnasts.

Introduction: In the context of young female athletes, namely elite gymnasts, effective stress management strategies not only enhance performance, but also reduce the risk of injuries and promote overall well-being. This study aims to investigate the effects of biofeedback-based training on stress management in prepubescent elite female gymnasts, recognizing its pivotal role in promoting healthy growth and proper training load management. Methods: Eight elite young female athletes from a top flight French national league club participated in an experimental condition involving four-week biofeedback training program to improve self-regulation skills, during both rest and stress phases. Additionally, each subject experienced a control condition, with entailed exposure to domain-specific motivational videos. Comprehensive evaluations of physiological parameters were conducted to assess the impact of biofeedback training, both before and after the training, as well as during the stress and recovery phases. Furthermore, an interoceptive body awareness test, using the MAIA questionnaire, was performed. Results: The results highlight a significant enhancement of the self-regulatory skills of the gymnasts in managing the selected physiological parameters-peripheral temperature (p < 0.05) and blood volume pressure (p < 0.05)-after the biofeedback treatment. Moreover, psychological data from the MAIA questionnaire revealed a noteworthy increase in interoceptive awareness (p < 0.001), particularly in the subscales of Not Distracting (p < 0.001), Attention regulation (p < 0.05), Emotional awareness (p < 0.05), and Self-regulation (p < 0.05). Discussion: Thus, we conclude that biofeedback training improves self-regulatory and psychological resilience under stressful conditions, while reducing sensitivity to gymnastics-specific stress.

The reverse buffering effect of workplace attachment style on the relationship between workplace bullying and work engagement.

Using the Job Demands-Resources model, this study investigates workplace attachment styles as predictors of work engagement and moderators of the well-established disengaging effect of workplace bullying. As a personal resource, we hypothesized that secure workplace attachment would foster work engagement, whereas both types of insecure workplace attachment (i.e., avoidant and preoccupied) would do the opposite. Previous work also led us to expect the relationship between workplace bullying and engagement to be stronger when targets expect it to act as job resource (i.e., secure workplace attachment) and weaker when their working model is consistent with workplace aggression-i.e., reverse buffering effects. Using the PROCESS macro, we tested these hypotheses in a convenience sample of French office employees (N = 472) who completed an online survey. Secure workplace attachment was associated with higher work engagement while insecure workplace attachment and bullying perceptions related negatively with work engagement. Supporting our hypotheses, feeling exposed to workplace bullying was most associated with disengagement in employees with a secure workplace attachment style and less so in others. Far from recommending insecure bonds as protection, our results rather highlight the need to prevent all forms of workplace aggression, thereby allowing employees to rely on their work environment as a job resource.

Creativity Is Contextual: A Narrative Review of Motor Creativity Tests From an Ecological Perspective.

This narrative review seeks to compare the various ways in which motor creativity has been measured and to critically evaluate those methods within the context of our contemporary understanding of motor creativity. Eligible studies included those of any study design, experimental or observational, as long as motor creativity was measured. Three databases (i.e., PubMed, Scopus, and ScienceDirect) were searched from the earliest possible start dates to December 2021. No risk of bias assessment was performed as the study outcomes were not the focus of the review. After screening for eligibility, 23 articles were included for review, all having measured motor creativity. Of the 23 articles, 16 measured generic motor creativity, while the remaining seven measured task-specific motor creativity. Furthermore, 16 of the studies tested motor creativity with largely static environmental constraints, while the remaining seven were conducted with dynamic environmental constraints. Using a contemporary understanding of motor creativity, most motor creativity tests presently do not possess sufficient task specificity and environmental dynamism, which may not provide an appropriate context for the emergence of creative motor action.

Psychometric validation of the French Multidimensional Chronic Asthenia Scale (MCAS) in a sample of 621 patients with chronic fatigue.

BACKGROUND: Psychometric validation of the Multidimensional Chronic Asthenia Scale (MCAS) was conducted in order to provide an effective tool for assessing the health-related quality of life of French-speaking patients with chronic asthenia (CA). METHODS: Items resulting from the initial formulation of the self-reported MCAS (along with other materials) were completed by French-speaking volunteers with inactive or active inflammatory bowel disease (IBD-I vs. IBD-A) or chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). Responses from 621 participants (180 patients with IBD-A, 172 with IBD-I, 269 with CFS) collected in a single online survey were divided into three subsamples to test the construct validity of the MCAS (Step 1, N = 240), to confirm its factorial structure (Step 2, N = 204) and to explore its convergent-discriminant validity with the Fatigue Symptoms Inventory (FSI) and revised Piper Fatigue Scale (r-PFS, Step 3, N = 177). RESULTS: Steps 1 and 2 showed that, as expected, MCAS has four dimensions: feeling of constraint (FoC), physical (PC), life (LC) and interpersonal consequences (IC), which are also related to the duration of CA (i.e., the longer it lasts, the more the dimensions are impacted). The results further showed that the MCAS is sensitive enough to capture between-group differences, with the CFS group being the most impaired, followed by IBD-A and IBD-I. While convergent-discriminant validity between the 4 factors of MCAS and FSI and r-PFS, respectively, was satisfactory overall, Step 3 also pointed to some limitations that call for future research (e.g., shared variances between the PC and IC dimensions of MCAS and behavioral dimension of r-PFS). CONCLUSION: Despite these limitations, the MCAS clearly constitutes a promising tool for measuring quantitative differences (i.e., severity/intensity) in CA associated with various diseases, but also, and importantly, the clinically important differences in domains of its expression (i.e., qualitative differences).

A study of postural changes after breast augmentation.

BACKGROUND: A number of factors, including body mass and one's mood, may influence posture. Breast augmentation results not only in a significant improvement in body image-related feelings and self-esteem but also in a sudden change in body mass. The aim of this study was to assess postural changes following breast augmentation by studying body position, orientation through space, and center of pressure. METHODS: Patients with breast hypoplasia who underwent breast augmentation were enrolled. Posture evaluation was performed before and 1, 4, and 12 months after surgery by quantifying the center of mass using the Fastrak™ system and the center of pressure using stabilometry. The Wilcoxon signed-rank sum test was used to compare value modifications. RESULTS: Forty-eight patients were enrolled in the study. A retropositioning of the upper part of the body, confirmed by baropodometric analysis, was evident in the early postoperative period. We subsequently observed a reprogramming of the biomechanical system, which reached a state of equilibrium 1 year after surgery, with a slight retropositioning of the head and a compensatory anterior positioning of the pelvis. CONCLUSION: We believe that with respect to posture, the role played by psychological aspects is even more important than that played by changes in body mass. Indeed, hypomastia is often associated with kyphosis because patients try to hide what they consider a deficiency. Following breast augmentation, the discovery of new breasts overcomes the dissatisfaction with the patient's own body image, increases self-esteem, and modifies posture regardless of the changes in body mass due to the insertion of the implants.

A study of postural changes after breast reduction.

BACKGROUND: Numerous factors such as the equilibrium of body masses and psychological status influence human posture. Breast reduction, on the one hand, produces a sudden change in this equilibrium, and on the other hand, it can modify the psychological status, significantly improving body image and self-esteem. This study aimed to assess postural changes after breast reduction by studying the position and orientation in space of the body and center of pressure. METHODS: The study enrolled 52 patients with breast hypertrophy scheduled to undergo breast reduction. Posture was evaluated before surgery and during the first year after surgery by quantifying the centers of mass using the Fastrak system and the center of pressure using stabilometry. The Wilcoxon signed-rank sum test was used to detect any changes. RESULTS: Retropositioning of the upper part of the body, confirmed by baropodometric analysis, was observed in the early postoperative period. The biomechanical system subsequently stabilized, reaching equilibrium 1 year after surgery. CONCLUSIONS: The authors believe that postural changes after breast reduction are due to changes in body mass as well as to the effects of physical and psychological factors on posture. Indeed, breast hypertrophy often is associated with kyphosis as patients try to hide what they consider to be a source of embarrassment. A new breast eliminates previous dissatisfaction with body image, reduces anxiety, and increases self-esteem. Improvements in body image and reduced weight in the anterior part of the body help to correct this postural disorder. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE II: This journal requires that authors assign a level of evidence to each article. For a full description of these Evidence-Based Medicine ratings, please refer to the Table of Contents or the online Instructions to Authors www.springer.com/00266 .

Learned self-regulation in top-level managers through neurobiofeedback training improves decision making under stress.

Top-level management teams are particularly exposed to stress factors as they frequently have to make important decision under stress. While an existing body of research evidence suggests that stress negatively affects decision-making processes, very little is known about possible strategies to reduce these negative effects. The aim of the current work is to investigate the effect of training self-regulation ability through neurobiofeedback on managers' intertemporal and risky decision making. Twenty-three managers were assigned to the experimental or the control condition. All participants performed, two decisional tasks, before and after a training phase. The tasks were administered through mouse tracker software, in order to measure participants' delay discounting and risk taking propensity on both explicit and implicit choice parameters. During the training phase, the experimental condition received a training protocol based on stress assessment tests via neurobiofeedback signals (i.e., temperature and skin conductance), with the goal of improving self-regulation ability while the control condition was administered a control training. The main result of this study is to have conclusively demonstrated that NBF training increases an individual's ability to self-regulate stress-related psychophysiological phenomena. Consequently, the improved ability to manage one's own reaction to stress enables a reduction in instinctive behavior during a probabilistic choice task.

Central and Peripheral Thermal Signatures of Brain-Derived Fatigue during Unilateral Resistance Exercise: A Preliminary Study.

Infrared thermography (IRT) allows to evaluate the psychophysiological state associated with emotions from facial temperature modulations. As fatigue is a brain-derived emotion, it is possible to hypothesize that facial temperature could provide information regarding the fatigue related to exercise. The aim of this study was to investigate the capability of IRT to assess the central and peripheral physiological effect of fatigue by measuring facial skin and muscle temperature modulations in response to a unilateral knee extension exercise until exhaustion. Rate of perceived exertion (RPE) was recorded at the end of the exercise. Both time- (∆TROI: pre-post exercise temperature variation) and frequency-domain (∆PSD: pre-post exercise power spectral density variation of specific frequency bands) analyses were performed to extract features from regions of interest (ROIs) positioned on the exercised and nonexercised leg, nose tip, and corrugator. The ANOVA-RM revealed a significant difference between ∆TROI (F(1.41,9.81) = 15.14; p = 0.0018), and between ∆PSD of myogenic (F(1.34,9.39) = 15.20; p = 0.0021) and neurogenic bands (F(1.75,12.26) = 9.96; p = 0.0034) of different ROIs. Moreover, significant correlations between thermal features and RPE were found. These findings suggest that IRT could assess both peripheral and central responses to physical exercise. Its applicability in monitoring the psychophysiological responses to exercise should be further explored.

Acute and cumulative effects of focused high-frequency vibrations on the endocrine system and muscle strength.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the acute and long-term effects of local high-intensity vibration (HLV, f = 300 Hz) on muscle performance and blood hormone concentrations in healthy young men. Totally 18 subjects (cV group) were studied in two sessions, either without (control) or with HLV treatment. The protocol was the same on both control and test days, except that, in the second session, subjects underwent HLV treatment. Counter-movement jumping (CMJ), maximal isometric voluntary contraction (MVC) test, and hormonal levels were measured before the procedure, immediately thereafter, and 1 h later. To assess the long-term effects of HLV, the cV group was subjected to HLV on the leg muscles for 4 weeks, and a second group (cR group, n = 18) embarked upon a resistance training program. All subjects underwent an MVC test and an isokinetic (100 deg/s) test before training, 4 weeks after training, and 2 months after the end of training. The HLV protocol significantly increased the serum level of growth hormone (GH, P < 0.05) and creatine phosphokinase (CPK, P < 0.05), and decreased the level of cortisol (P < 0.05). None of GH, CPK or testosterone levels were altered in controls. There was a significant improvement in MVC (P < 0.05). After 4 weeks, both the cV and cR groups demonstrated significant improvement in MVC and isokinetic tests (P < 0.05). This increase persisted for at least 2 months. Our results indicate that HLV influences the levels of particular hormones and improves neuromuscular performance. Our results indicate that HLV has a long-term beneficial effect comparable to that of resistance training.

Bodily Information and Top-Down Affective Priming Jointly Affect the Processing of Fearful Faces.

According to embodied theories, the processing of emotions such as happiness or fear is grounded in emotion-specific perceptual, bodily, and physiological processes. Under these views, perceiving an emotional stimulus (e.g., a fearful face) re-enacts interoceptive and bodily states congruent with that emotion (e.g., increases heart rate); and in turn, interoceptive and bodily changes (e.g., increases of heart rate) influence the processing of congruent emotional content. A previous study by Pezzulo et al. (2018) provided evidence for this embodied congruence, reporting that experimentally increasing heart rate with physical exercise facilitated the processing of facial expressions congruent with that interoception (fear), but not those conveying incongruent states (disgust or neutrality). Here, we investigated whether the above (bottom-up) interoceptive manipulation and the (top-down) priming of affective content may jointly influence the processing of happy and fearful faces. The fact that happiness and fear are both associated with high heart rate but have different (positive and negative) valence permits testing the hypothesis that their processing might be facilitated by the same interoceptive manipulation (the increase of heart rate) but two opposite (positive and negative) affective primes. To test this hypothesis, we asked participants to perform a gender-categorization task of happy, fearful, and neutral faces, which were preceded by positive, negative, and neutral primes. Participants performed the same task in two sessions (after rest, with normal heart rate, or exercise, with faster heart rate) and we recorded their response times and mouse movements during the choices. We replicated the finding that when participants were in the exercise condition, they processed fearful faces faster than when they were in the rest condition. However, we did not find the same reduction in response time for happy (or neutral) faces. Furthermore, we found that when participants were in the exercise condition, they processed fearful faces faster in the presence of negative compared to positive or neutral primes; but we found no equivalent facilitation of positive (or neutral) primes during the processing of happy (or neutral) faces. While the asymmetries between the processing of fearful and happy faces require further investigation, our findings promisingly indicate that the processing of fearful faces is jointly influenced by both bottom-up interoceptive states and top-down affective primes that are congruent with the emotion.

Slow-Speed Resistance Training Increases Skeletal Muscle Contractile Properties and Power Production Capacity in Elite Futsal Players.

The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of slow-speed resistance training with low intensity (SRT) on muscle power output in elite futsal players with respect to traditional resistance training. The authors hypothesized that the muscle deoxygenation during SRT causes early recruitment of fast twitch fibers that would positively affect strength and power performance. Thirty male elite futsal players were recruited and randomly assigned either to SRT group or to traditional resistance training (TRT) group. All players underwent an 8-weeks experimental protocol consisting of 2 training sessions per week at both leg curl and leg extension machines. In the SRT, players lifted 50% of one maximum repetition (1RM) involving 3 s for eccentric and concentric actions. In the TRT, players lifted 80% of 1RM involving 1 s for eccentric and concentric actions. All players were tested twice (pre and post) for sprint and jump performances, maximal isometric voluntary contraction (MVC) and maximal isokinetic peak torque (Peak TQ) and total work (TW) at 60 and 120°/s (on knee extensors and flexors). The two groups presented remarkable differences in the within-group changes for all the variables. SRT exhibited greater improvements in both Peak TQ and TW for knee extensors and flexors at 120°/s. Conversely, TRT showed greater improvements in MVC, and in both Peak TQ and TW for knee extensors and flexors at 60°/s, except for Peak TQ of the knee extensors, where no significant difference was found between TRT and SRT. Countermovement jump showed a decrease in eccentric time and an increase in concentric force in SRT group. SRT and TRT resulted effective to enhance the strength performance indices during the 8-weeks experimental protocol. Peak torque at 120°/s explained more of the contractile characteristic effects of SRT training than MVC, suggesting that slow-speed training can cause fast twitch fibers hypertrophy in elite athletes. Since slow-speed training is supposed to produce a decreased exercise-induced muscle damage, SRT method is a suitable option in strength training for futsal and team sports.

Dynamics of Experience in a Learning Protocol: A Case Study in Climbing.

Many of the studies on motor learning have investigated the dynamics of learning behaviors and shown that the learning process is non-linear, self-organized, and situated. Aligned with this research trend, studies within the enactive paradigm focus on learners' lived experience to understand how it shapes their intentions, actions, and perceptions. Thus, a joint analysis of experiential and behavioral assessments might help to explain the dynamics of learning (e.g., the transition between stable states). The aim of this case study was to analyze the dynamics of a beginner climber's lived experience as his performance progressed (i.e., climbing fluency) during a learning protocol. The protocol comprised 10 climbing sessions over 5 weeks. During the sessions, the climber had to climb a "control route" (CR) (i.e., a route that never changed) and "variants" (i.e., novel routes, in which the spatial layout of the holds was modified). Phenomenological data were collected with self-confrontation interviews after each session. From the verbalizations, a thematic analysis of the climber's intentions, actions, and perceptions was performed to detect the general dimensions of his experience. The behavioral data (the climber's performance) were assessed using four indicators of climbing fluency: climbing time (CT), immobility ratio (IR), geometric index of entropy (GIE) of the hip trajectory, and the jerk. Our results highlighted the dynamics of the climber's lived experience and performances in the unchanged and novel environments. The dynamics on the CR were characterized by four crucial episodes and the dynamics on the variants, by four ways of experiencing novelty. Our results are discussed around three points: (i) the climber's definition of his enacted fluency in terms of intentions, actions, and perceptions; (ii) how the definition was identified through a dynamic phenomenological synthesis; and (iii) three effects that characterize the dynamics: challenge, metaphor, and a refinement in perceptions.

Acute Effect of Exercise on Cognitive Performance in Middle-Aged Adults: Aerobic Versus Balance.

BACKGROUND: Recent evidence has suggested that chronic physical activities including balance exercises have positive effects on cognition, but their acute effects are still unknown. In the present study, the authors tested the hypothesis that an acute bout of balance exercise would enhance cognitive performance compared with aerobic activity. METHODS: A total of 20 healthy middle-aged adults completed 2 acute 30-minute balance and moderate-intensity aerobic exercise sessions on 2 counterbalanced separate occasions. To assess cognitive functions, performance tasks in executive control, perceptual speed, and simple reaction time were tested before and immediately after each exercise session. RESULTS: Although there were no significant interactions (time × exercise condition, P > .05), the main effects of time were significant in executive control (P < .05), perceptual speed (P < .05), and simple reaction time (P < .001), showing improvements after both exercises. CONCLUSIONS: These findings highlight that both types of exercise (aerobic, more metabolic and less cognitively demanding; balance, more cognitively and less metabolically demanding) were able to positively affect simple reaction time performance, perceptual speed, and executive control independently of physiological adjustments occurring during aerobic or balance exercise.