Psychophysiology最新文献

Body movements like walking can synchronize with auditory and visual inputs presented within a periodic frequency range, peaking around 2 Hz. Some evidence has shown that the spontaneous tempo of human locomotion is around 2 Hz. The EEG frequency-tagging approach allows us to capture the coupling of beat perception with neural brain oscillations at beat frequency. This study used EEG frequency tagging to explore brain dynamics during the perception of walking-related sensory information in the auditory (footstep sounds) and visual (point-light figure) modalities. Sensory inputs were delivered at different rates (1, 2, and 3.6 Hz) in rhythmic or random sequences while recording EEG activity. The experiment included three conditions: (i) auditory, (ii) visual, and (iii) audiovisual, including data from 22 participants. Results showed a main effect of rhythmic sequences compared with random sequences across all frequencies in all three auditory, visual, or audiovisual conditions. Specifically, at 2 Hz, rhythmic sequences enhanced neural entrainment in the sensorimotor cortex for auditory and audiovisual conditions. This effect was absent in the visual condition alone. Notably, 2 Hz rhythmic sequences in the audiovisual condition led to coupling with temporal, sensorimotor, and occipital regions. The study suggests that sensory auditory input related to walking movement presented at 2 Hz can mediate neural entrainment with sensorimotor areas. The findings of this study can have an impact on the spontaneous rhythmic integration of body movements using sensory inputs for walking rehabilitation.

Neural development begins in gestation and rapidly accelerates throughout early life. The environmental effect of infant diet is a subject of increasing study as it is the basic nutritive sources which support biological processes essential for healthy development. Previous research in our group has found small but significant effects of nutrition on early cognitive developmental tests between children primarily fed human milk (BF), soy-based formula (SF), and dairy-based formula (MF) for the first 12 months of life. This investigation uses this same data set: a study throughout infancy from 2 to 12 months of life. This study seeks to compare brain maturation using EEG aperiodic exponent between infants who received breast milk feeding and those who received a dairy-based or soy formula. High-density electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings were taken at 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, and 12 months of age using a 5-min silent video baseline. Using Specparam (formerly fitting oscillations and one-over-F or "FOOOF"), aperiodic activity was computed through a power spectral density (PSD) analysis for each session, which were then averaged per dietary group over left, right, and medial frontal and parietal regions of interest (ROIs) and one occipital ROI. Aperiodic exponent is a potential marker of neuromaturation, as it is hypothesized to relate to excitatory/inhibitory (E/I) balance and structural development in GABAergic systems. We used generalized estimating equations in order to evaluate differences in aperiodic exponent across dietary grouping as well as across age. Consistent with some previous findings, aperiodic exponent was found to decrease with age; however, no significant associations were found with infant diet except at 3 months of age in which BF infants had a larger aperiodic exponent than formula fed (FF) infants.

Although the death of a loved one is a ubiquitous experience with chest pain a commonly reported symptom, grief-related chest pain and particularly its physiological mechanisms remain under-investigated. To address this gap, we adopted Rodger's approach to concept analysis to explore the psychoneuroimmunological mechanisms potentially linking bereavement to chest pain and subsequent health outcomes. A PubMed search, followed by a systematic review of existing literature and clinical observations, yielded 220 articles, of which 49 were included in the conceptual analysis. Notably, only four empirical studies specifically examined grief-related chest pain, but without underlying physiological mechanisms, while 45 studies explored psychoneuroimmune processes more broadly in the context of loss, grief, and bereavement. Based on these findings, we propose a theoretical model of grief-related chest pain. The model integrates insights from studies on autonomic, hemodynamic, musculoskeletal, respiratory, neuroendocrine, and immune changes during grief. It summarizes antecedents, attributes, and consequences of grief-related chest pain, highlighting the putative interrelated roles of physiological, neuroendocrine, and immune pathways. Our model suggests that grief-related chest pain may constitute a key physical symptom of grief, arising from physiological responses to acute emotional distress and loss. A deeper understanding of the psychobiological mechanisms underlying this phenomenon may provide prognostic insights, inform disease prevention, improve patient care, and guide the development of targeted interventions. Building on this perspective, we also propose a toolkit to facilitate the assessment of grief-related chest pain in future empirical studies.

Working memory (WM) decline in aging may be related to increases in "neural noise", potentially reflected in the EEG aperiodic exponent. We reanalyzed previously published data to investigate age-related differences in the aperiodic exponent during verbal WM and its relationship with neural inefficiency. EEG was recorded from 24 younger (18-35 years) and 30 older adults (50-86 years) during a modified Sternberg task with 1-letter, 3-letter, and 5-letter load conditions. Younger adults consistently demonstrated steeper aperiodic slopes than older adults. Unexpectedly, both age groups showed decreased (i.e., flattened) aperiodic exponents during retention relative to fixation, with minimal load-dependent effects. Notably, the relationship between task-related exponent changes and WM performance was complex and dependent on the exponent at fixation, particularly in older adults. Finally, flatter exponents during fixation and late retention were associated with greater neural inefficiency during stimulus processing, reflected by increased P3b amplitudes without corresponding WM performance improvements. These findings suggest that flatter exponents are associated with less efficient neural processing and that older adults flexibly modulate their aperiodic exponent during retention to support WM performance.

Increasing evidence shows that time perception can also be described as a form of unconscious Bayesian inference. A controversy in Bayesian modeling of time perception revolves around whether individuals rely on the statistical regularity of input durations as priors (statistical priors) or dynamically update the priors with each estimate (dynamic priors). In a time reproduction task, participants were asked to reproduce a series of sample durations within both short and long time ranges, while the electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded synchronously. Behavioral results showed that within each range, short durations were overestimated while long durations were underestimated. Additionally, the reproduced time increased proportionally with the duration of the preceding trial. Prediction errors (PE) were calculated based on both types of priors. Within each range, the statistical and dynamic priors both predicted the PE decreased as the sample duration of the current trial increased, while only the dynamic prior predicted PE increased with the sample duration of the preceding trial. EEG results showed that the offset of the sample duration elicited a frontocentral distributed P3a. Within each range, the P3a amplitude decreased as the current sample duration increased, and increased as the duration in the previous trial increased. The PE calculated based on dynamic priors more accurately predicted the P3a amplitude compared to the PE calculated using statistical priors. These results suggest that the P3a serves as a neural signature of temporal PE and provide electrophysiological evidence supporting the dynamic prior hypothesis. Taken together, our study demonstrated a link between Bayesian models and predictive coding theory, offering a viable neural implementation of Bayesian predictive coding.

Research indicates that the reward positivity (RewP) can be elicited by both appetitive gain (e.g., winning money) and aversive outcome avoidance (e.g., safety from a noise blast). Yet, little work has linked these differential reward responses with avoidance-related psychopathology risk factors. The present study addressed this gap by examining the associations of distress intolerance (DI), a risk factor for maladaptive avoidance-based strategies, with reward responses during two versions of a simple guessing task: the monetary doors task and aversive avoidance doors task. Young adults (n = 102) were recruited from a large university campus to complete two versions of a doors task in which they were instructed to choose one of two doors and view feedback that indicated monetary gain/loss in one task (i.e., monetary doors task) or avoidance/administration of an aversive noise blast in the other task (i.e., aversive avoidance doors task). The RewP was extracted at FCz from 250 to 350 ms in each condition. ΔAvoidance RewP was calculated as the residualized difference score of Avoidance Win (i.e., no aversive sound) relative to Avoidance Loss (i.e., pending noise blast administration). ΔMonetary RewP was calculated as the residualized difference score of Monetary Win relative to Loss. Feedback-locked P300 waveforms in each condition were also extracted. Results indicated that greater self-reported DI was linked with a larger ΔAvoidance RewP (β = 0.32, p = 0.026) and Avoidance Feedback P300 (β = 0.36, p = 0.012) but not the ΔMonetary RewP (p = 0.467) or Monetary Feedback P300 (p = 0.573). Findings were not better explained by self-reported symptoms of depression, trait anxiety, trauma history, or task-related state anxiety. The present study demonstrates that elevated DI is associated with exaggerated reward activation to avoidance-related feedback (ΔAvoidance RewP). Taken together, this work advances our understanding of DI and suggests the utility of the ΔAvoidance RewP for understanding disruptions of negative reinforcement.

Auditory rhythm perception involves bottom-up encoding of timing information and top-down maintenance of a particular interpretation, such as grouping beats to form meter. Top-down meter perception can be measured using electroencephalographic responses like mismatch negativity (MMN), P3a, and Steady-State Evoked Potentials (SSEPs). Previously we primed infants to perceive an ambiguous six-beat rhythm in either duple (two-beat groupings) or triple (three-beat groupings) meter by adding loudness accents to every second or third beat, respectively. For the subsequently presented unaccented rhythm, infants exhibited larger mismatch responses for pitch deviants on primed strong beats, particularly after duple priming. Here we applied the same protocol to adults while exploring the role of attention. Adults were passively primed to perceive the rhythm as duple or triple identically as the infants in the previous study (Experiment 1a), or were instructed to actively imagine the accents (Experiment 1b). Results showed that MMN and P3a were modulated by beat position and priming group, but the pattern depended on participants' music experience. Further, neural tracking (SSEPs) for the primed meter was enhanced for participants who actively imagined the accents for triple meter. Additionally, a strong bias for duple meter was evident in generally larger P3a for beat 5 compared to beat 4, regardless of priming or attention condition. As this was driven by the musically experienced participants, it likely reflects enculturation to Western music, in which duple meter dominates. These results indicate that adults' top-down meter perception is modulated by attention and enculturated biases.

Objects typically appear within rich visual scenes. By capitalizing on learnt statistical pairings between objects and scenes, the visual system can use scene information to generate predictions about objects likely to occur within a given environment. Some models of visual system function propose that scene information is extracted from low-spatial frequency components and rapidly propagates through the visual processing hierarchy. This contextual information may help bias perceptual inferences toward objects that are likely to appear within a scene, enacted via top-down feedback carrying predictions. We tested this hypothesized influence of low spatial frequency information through newly learnt predictive object-scene associations. We recorded electroencephalographic (EEG) data from 40 participants who viewed high-spatial frequency objects either in isolation or embedded within low- or high-spatial frequency scenes. Object-scene pairings were probabilistically manipulated such that certain objects more frequently appeared in certain scenes. We trained classifiers on EEG data from object-only trials and tested them on object plus scene trials. We did not observe differences in classification accuracy across expected and unexpected objects for both low- and high-spatial frequency scenes, and any interaction between spatial frequency and expectation. However, we observed expectation effects on event-related potentials for both spatial frequency conditions. These effects arose at similar latencies for both low- and high-spatial frequency scenes but interacted with the expectation effects. Together, we report evidence that expectations induced by object-scene pairings influence visually evoked responses but do not modulate object representations.

Human interpersonal coordination can yield synchronization at multiple timescales, including behavioral (auditory-motor) and physiological (respiratory and cardiac) levels; yet the causal relationship among these levels is poorly understood. We examine dyadic synchronization at behavioral (tone onsets) and physiological (respiratory and cardiac) levels in music performance, a rhythmic task that requires fine temporal coordination among performers. By perturbing dyads' auditory-motor synchrony or their respiration during joint melody perception and production, we demonstrate the directional influence from dyadic respiration synchrony to behavioral synchrony. Respiratory perturbations impaired both dyadic respiratory and behavioral synchrony, whereas auditory-motor perturbations disrupted only dyadic behavioral synchrony. Furthermore, individual differences influenced dyadic synchrony: partners with similar spontaneous production rates achieved better behavioral synchrony in joint production, and partners with similar resting heart rates exhibited stronger cardiac synchrony in joint production. These findings reveal directional entrainment processes between respiratory and behavioral synchrony, and highlight the pivotal role of individual differences in interpersonal coordination.

Depressive disorders often show recurrent courses that cannot be sufficiently prevented by existing therapeutic protocols. In other affective disorders, recurrence has been linked to three mechanisms -spontaneous recovery, accelerated new/relearning, and reinstatement- which are related to the preservation of disorder-related memory traces even through successful extinction-based interventions. Reconsolidation-interference protocols aim to directly alter such traces by reactivating and destabilizing them before intervention. While this approach has shown benefits in fear, craving, and trauma-related symptoms, its application to depression remains untested. To our knowledge, this study provides the first experimental evidence of its utility in depression-like states. Sixty participants took part in a three-day, three-group, double-blind randomized controlled trial. On day one, helplessness was induced using a modified unsolvable anagram task. On day two, participants were randomized into three groups undergoing different interventions while completing another cognitive demanding task: (1) extinction, where participants experienced success from start to finish; (2) reconsolidation, where participants briefly reexperienced failure before succeeding; or (3) reactivation, where failure repeated. On day three, the helplessness task was presented again to evaluate susceptibility for recurrence across conditions. Behavioral, self-report, and EEG data were collected. Across test days, participants showed reduced motivation and performance, attributing failure to personal ability, confirming successful helplessness induction. However, interventions at day two produced no robust group differences on behavioral, self-report, or EEG measures. Exploratory analyses suggested that brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) levels may have mediated outcomes. Findings do not confirm reconsolidation-based behavioral interference as effective for depression-like helplessness. Nonetheless, exploratory results highlight BDNF as a potential mediator, warranting further study on its role in postretrieval extinction effects in depression.