| 1. |
- Koenig, Julian, et al.
(författare)
-
Cortical thickness and resting-state cardiac function across the lifespan : A cross-sectional pooled mega-analysis
- 2021
-
Ingår i: Psychophysiology. - : Wiley. - 0048-5772 .- 1469-8986 .- 1540-5958. ; 58:7
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Understanding the association between autonomic nervous system [ANS] function and brain morphology across the lifespan provides important insights into neurovisceral mechanisms underlying health and disease. Resting-state ANS activity, indexed by measures of heart rate [HR] and its variability [HRV] has been associated with brain morphology, particularly cortical thickness [CT]. While findings have been mixed regarding the anatomical distribution and direction of the associations, these inconsistencies may be due to sex and age differences in HR/HRV and CT. Previous studies have been limited by small sample sizes, which impede the assessment of sex differences and aging effects on the association between ANS function and CT. To overcome these limitations, 20 groups worldwide contributed data collected under similar protocols of CT assessment and HR/HRV recording to be pooled in a mega-analysis (N = 1,218 (50.5% female), mean age 36.7 years (range: 12–87)). Findings suggest a decline in HRV as well as CT with increasing age. CT, particularly in the orbitofrontal cortex, explained additional variance in HRV, beyond the effects of aging. This pattern of results may suggest that the decline in HRV with increasing age is related to a decline in orbitofrontal CT. These effects were independent of sex and specific to HRV; with no significant association between CT and HR. Greater CT across the adult lifespan may be vital for the maintenance of healthy cardiac regulation via the ANS—or greater cardiac vagal activity as indirectly reflected in HRV may slow brain atrophy. Findings reveal an important association between CT and cardiac parasympathetic activity with implications for healthy aging and longevity that should be studied further in longitudinal research.
|
|
| 2. |
- Pankow, Anne, et al.
(författare)
-
Aberrant Salience Is Related to Dysfunctional Self-Referential Processing in Psychosis
- 2016
-
Ingår i: Schizophrenia Bulletin. - : Oxford University Press. - 0586-7614 .- 1745-1701. ; 42:1, s. 67-76
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background. A dysfunctional differentiation between self-relevant and irrelevant information may affect the perception of environmental stimuli as abnormally salient. The aberrant salience hypothesis assumes that positive symptoms arise from an attribution of salience to irrelevant stimuli accompanied by the feeling of self-relevance. Self-referential processing relies on the activation of cortical midline structures which was demonstrated to be impaired in psychosis. We investigated the neural correlates of self-referential processing, aberrant salience attribution, and the relationship between these 2 measures across the psychosis continuum. Methods. Twenty-nine schizophrenia patients, 24 healthy individuals with subclinical delusional ideation, and 50 healthy individuals participated in this study. Aberrant salience was assessed behaviorally in terms of reaction times to task irrelevant cues. Participants performed a self-reference task during fMRI in which they had to apply neutral trait words to them or to a public figure. The correlation between self-referential processing and aberrant salience attribution was tested. Results. Schizophrenia patients displayed increased aberrant salience attribution compared with healthy controls and individuals with subclinical delusional ideation, while the latter exhibited intermediate aberrant salience scores. In the self-reference task, schizophrenia patients showed reduced activation in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), but individuals with subclinical delusional ideation did not differ from healthy controls. In schizophrenia patients, vmPFC activation correlated negatively with implicit aberrant salience attribution. Conclusions. Higher aberrant salience attribution in schizophrenia patients is related to reduced vmPFC activation during self-referential judgments suggesting that aberrant relevance coding is reflected in decreased neural self-referential processing as well as in aberrant salience attribution.
|
|
| 3. |
- Quintero, Luis, et al.
(författare)
-
Excite-O-Meter : an Open-Source Unity Plugin to Analyze Heart Activity and Movement Trajectories in Custom VR Environments
- 2022
-
Ingår i: 2022 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW). - Los Alamitos : IEEE. - 9781665484039 - 9781665484022 ; , s. 46-47
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article explains the new features of the Excite-O-Meter, an open-source tool that enables the collection of bodily data, real-time feature extraction, and post-session data visualization in any custom VR environment developed in Unity. Besides analyzing heart activity, the tool supports now multidimensional time series to study motion trajectories in VR. The paper presents the main functionalities and discusses the relevance of the tool for behavioral and psychophysiological research.
|
|
| 4. |
- Velez Quintero, Luis Eduardo, et al.
(författare)
-
Excite-O-Meter : Software Framework to Integrate Heart Activity in Virtual Reality
- 2021
-
Ingår i: 2021 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR). - : IEEE. - 9781665401586 ; , s. 357-366
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Bodily signals can complement subjective and behavioral measures to analyze human factors, such as user engagement or stress, when interacting with virtual reality (VR) environments. Enabling widespread use of (also the real-time analysis) of bodily signals in VR applications could be a powerful method to design more user-centric, personalized VR experiences. However, technical and scientific challenges (e.g., cost of research-grade sensing devices, required coding skills, expert knowledge needed to interpret the data) complicate the integration of bodily data in existing interactive applications. This paper presents the design, development, and evaluation of an open-source software framework named Excite-O-Meter. It allows existing VR applications to integrate, record, analyze, and visualize bodily signals from wearable sensors, with the example of cardiac activity (heart rate and its variability) from the chest strap Polar H10. Survey responses from 58 potential users determined the design requirements for the framework. Two tests evaluated the framework and setup in terms of data acquisition/analysis and data quality. Finally, we present an example experiment that shows how our tool can be an easy-to-use and scientifically validated tool for researchers, hobbyists, or game designers to integrate bodily signals in VR applications.
|
|
