Inhalation boosts perceptual awareness and decision speed.

The emergence of consciousness is one of biology's biggest mysteries. During the past two decades, a major effort has been made to identify the neural correlates of consciousness, but in comparison, little is known about the physiological mechanisms underlying first-person subjective experience. Attention is considered the gateway of information to consciousness. Recent work suggests that the breathing phase (i.e., inhalation vs. exhalation) modulates attention, in such a way that attention directed toward exteroceptive information would increase during inhalation. One key hypothesis emerging from this work is that inhalation would improve perceptual awareness and near-threshold decision-making. The present study directly tested this hypothesis. We recorded the breathing rhythms of 30 humans performing a near-threshold decision-making task, in which they had to decide whether a liminal Gabor was tilted to the right or the left (objective decision task) and then to rate their perceptual awareness of the Gabor orientation (subjective decision task). In line with our hypothesis, the data revealed that, relative to exhalation, inhalation improves perceptual awareness and speeds up objective decision-making, without impairing accuracy. Overall, the present study builds on timely questions regarding the physiological mechanisms underlying consciousness and shows that breathing shapes the emergence of subjective experience and decision-making.NEW & NOTEWORTHY Breathing is a ubiquitous biological rhythm in animal life. However, little is known about its effect on consciousness and decision-making. Here, we measured the respiratory rhythm of humans performing a near-threshold discrimination experiment. We show that inhalation, compared with exhalation, improves perceptual awareness and accelerates decision-making while leaving accuracy unaffected.

The respiratory modulation of interoception.

In a recent article published in The Journal of Neurophysiology titled "Sensitivity to changes in rate of heartbeats as a measure of interoceptive ability," Larsson et al. (J Neurophysiol 126: 1799-1813, 2021) introduce a new method to evaluate the interoceptive ability and report a surprising tendency in humans to perceive fewer heartbeats during spontaneous increases in resting heart rate. The authors argue that this result reflects a reduction in the strength of the heartbeat during the inspiration periods. Here, we discuss this finding and propose a complementary interpretation grounded on consciousness research and an emerging literature showing the influence of the breathing phase on perception and brain activity at rest.

Decoding identity from motion: how motor similarities colour our perception of self and others.

For more than 4 decades, it has been shown that humans are particularly sensitive to biological motion and extract socially relevant information from it such as gender, intentions, emotions or a person's identity. A growing number of findings, however, indicate that identity perception is not always highly accurate, especially due to large inter-individual differences and a fuzzy self-recognition advantage compared to the recognition of others. Here, we investigated the self-other identification performance and sought to relate this performance to the metric properties of perceptual/physical representations of individual motor signatures. We show that identity perception ability varies substantially across individuals and is associated to the perceptual/physical motor similarities between self and other stimuli. Specifically, we found that the perceptual representations of postural signatures are veridical in the sense that closely reflects the physical postural trajectories and those similarities between people' actions elicit numerous misattributions. While, on average, people can well recognize their self-generated actions, they more frequently attribute to themselves the actions of those acting in a similar way. These findings are consistent with the common coding theory and support that perception and action are tightly linked and may modulate each other by virtue of similarity.

Positive Impacts of a Four-Week Neuro-Meditation Program on Cognitive Function in Post-Acute Sequelae of COVID-19 Patients: A Randomized Controlled Trial.

Study objective: Long COVID patients can experience high levels of impairment in their cognitive function and mental health. Using a parallel randomized control trial, we evaluated the effectiveness of a neuro-meditation program to reduce cognitive impairment in patients with long COVID. Methods: A total of 34 patients with long COVID were randomized to an intervention group (G-Int; n = 17) or a control group (G-Con; n = 17) and 15 healthy participants were constitutive of a normative group (G-Nor). The intervention consisted of ten 30-min sessions of Rebalance® over a period of five weeks. Each session included sound therapy and coach-guided meditation associated with light stimulations (i.e., chromotherapy). Primary outcomes were performance on five computerized cognitive tasks (choice response time, pattern comparison, Simon, pursuit rotor task, and Corsi block-tapping task), mental and physical fatigue (Chalder fatigue scale), perceived stress (perceived stress scale) and mood (profiles of mood states). Secondary outcomes were anxiety and depressive symptoms (hospital anxiety and depression scale), muscular pain, joint pain, and headaches using visual analog scales (VAS) as well as sleep quality (Spiegel sleep questionnaire). Assessments were conducted at baseline and at 1−2 and 7−8 days of follow-up. Results: Compared to healthy subjects, long COVID patients showed significant differences at baseline on all the self-report questionnaires, and a Rebalance® program improved all the subjective reports, as well as cognitive performances, especially on reaction time-based tasks. In particular, only the G-Int group revealed shortened reaction times in the choice reaction time (RTbaseline = 593 ± 121 ms vs. RTpost2 = 521 ± 86 ms, p < 0.001), Simon (RTbaseline = 539 ± 123 ms vs. RTpost2 = 494 ± 134 ms, p < 0.01), and pattern comparison tasks (RTbaseline = 1244 ± 315 ms vs. RTpost2 = 1079 ± 213 ms, p < 0.001). Conclusions) Initial evidence suggests that neuro-meditation reduces cognitive impairment and improves physical and mental fatigue, muscle and joint pain, symptoms of depression and anxiety, mood disturbances as well as sleep quality. The Rebalance® program hence constitutes a promising non-pharmacological intervention for the treatment of long-term psychological/cognitive outcomes of COVID-19.

Towards an Embodied Signature of Improvisation Skills.

Improvisation is not limited to the performing arts, but is extended to everyday life situations such as conversations and decision-making. Due to their ubiquitous nature, improvisation skills have received increasing attention from researchers over the last decade. A core challenge is to grasp the complex creative processes involved in improvisation performance. To date, many studies have attempted to provide insight on brain activity and perceptual experiences when perceiving a performance, especially in musical or artistic form. However, watching/listening a performance is quite different than acting in a performance or performing daily-life activities. In this Perspective, we discuss how researchers have often missed key points concerning the study of improvisation skills, especially by ignoring the central role of bodily experiences in their formation. Furthermore, we consider how the study of (neglected) motor component of improvisation performance can provide valuable insights into the underlying nature of creative processes involved in improvisation skills and their acquisition. Finally, we propose a roadmap for studying improvisation from the acquisition of kinematic data in an ecological context to analysis, including the consideration of the coalition of (individual, environmental and task) constraints in the emergence of improvised behaviors.

Standing or swaying to the beat: Discrete auditory rhythms entrain stance and promote postural coordination stability.

Humans seem to take social and behavioral advantages of entraining themselves with discrete auditory rhythms (e.g., dancing, communicating). We investigated the benefits of such an entrainment on posture during standing (spontaneous entrainment) and during a whole-body swaying task (intentional synchronization). We first evaluated how body sway was entrained by different auditory metronome frequencies (0.25, 0.5, and 1.0Hz). We then assessed the stabilizing role of auditory rhythms on postural control, characterized in a dynamical systems perspective by informational anchoring of the head (local stabilization) and fewer transitions from in-phase to anti-phase ankle-hip coordination (global stabilization). Our results revealed in both situations an entrainment of postural movements by external rhythms. This entrainment tended to be more effective when the metronome frequency (0.25Hz) was close to the dominant sway frequency. Particularly, we found during intentional synchronization that head movements were less variable when paced by a slower beat (informational anchoring), and that phase transitions between the two stable patterns in postural dynamics were delayed. Our findings demonstrate that human bipedal posture can be actively or spontaneously modulated by an external discrete auditory rhythm, which might be exploited for the purpose of learning and rehabilitation.

Postural Coordination during Socio-motor Improvisation.

Human interaction often relies on socio-motor improvisation. Creating unprepared movements during social interaction is not a random process but relies on rules of synchronization. These situations do not only involve people to be coordinated, but also require the adjustment of their posture in order to maintain balance and support movements. The present study investigated posture in such a context. More precisely, we first evaluated the impact of amplitude and complexity of arm movements on posture in solo situation. Then, we assessed the impact of interpersonal coordination on posture using the mirror game in which dyads performed improvised and synchronized movements (i.e., duo situation). Posture was measured through ankle-hip coordination in medio-lateral and antero-posterior directions (ML and AP respectively). Our results revealed the spontaneous emergence of in-phase pattern in ML direction and antiphase pattern in AP direction for solo and duo situations. These two patterns respectively refer to the simultaneous flexion/extension of the ankles and the hips in the same or opposite direction. It suggests different functional roles of postural coordination patterns in each direction, with in-phase supporting task performance in ML (dynamical stability) and antiphase supporting postural control in AP (mechanical stability). Although amplitude of movement did not influence posture, movement complexity disturbed postural stability in both directions. Conversely, interpersonal coordination promoted postural stability in ML but not in AP direction. These results are discussed in terms of the difference in coupling strength between ankle-hip coordination and interpersonal coordination.

The acquisition of socio-motor improvisation in the mirror game.

Socio-motor improvisation is defined as the creative action of two or more people without a script or anticipated preparation. It is evaluated through two main parameters: movement synchronization and movement richness. Experts in art (e.g., dance, theater or music) are known to exhibit higher synchronization and to perform richer movements during interpersonal improvisation, but how these competences evolve over time is largely unknown. In the present study, we investigated whether performing more synchronized and richer movements over time can promote the acquisition of improvisation. Pairs of novice participants were instructed to play an improvisation mirror game in three different sessions. Between sessions, they performed an unintended interpersonal coordination task in which synchronization and richness were manipulated, resulting in four different groups of dyads. Our results demonstrate that synchronization during improvisation improved for all groups whereas movement richness only enhanced for dyads that performed synchronized movements during unintended coordination tasks. Our findings suggest that movement synchrony contributes more than movement richness to the acquisition of socio-motor improvisation in the mirror game.