Concurrent Supra-Postural Auditory-Hand Coordination Task Affects Postural Control: Using Sonification to Explore Environmental Unpredictability in Factors Affecting Fall Risk.

Clinical screening tests for balance and mobility often fall short of predicting fall risk. Cognitive distractors and unpredictable external stimuli, common in busy natural environments, contribute to this risk, especially in older adults. Less is known about the effects of upper sensory-motor coordination, such as coordinating one's hand with an external stimulus.

Grounding social timing: A commentary on "The evolution of social timing" by Verga et al. (2023).

We are excited about Verga et al.'s [22] exhortation to look beyond humans to understand the purpose, scope, and evolution of social timing. We argue that the field should expand even further.

Coordination Rigidity in the Gait, Posture, and Speech of Persons with Parkinson's Disease.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is associated with reduced coordination abilities. These can result either in random or rigid patterns of movement. The latter, described here as coordination rigidity (CR), have been studied less often.

Betaglycan promoter activity is differentially regulated during myogenesis in zebrafish embryo somites.

Background: Betaglycan, also known as the TGFβ type III receptor (Tgfbr3), is a co-receptor that modulates TGFβ family signaling. Tgfbr3 is upregulated during C2C12 myoblast differentiation and expressed in mouse embryos myocytes.

Results: To investigate tgfbr3 transcriptional regulation during zebrafish embryonic myogenesis, we cloned a 3.

On the scaling properties of oscillatory modes with balanced energy.

Animal bodies maintain themselves with the help of networks of physiological processes operating over a wide range of timescales. Many physiological signals are characterized by 1/ scaling where the amplitude is inversely proportional to frequency, presumably reflecting the multi-scale nature of the underlying network. Although there are many general theories of such scaling, it is less clear how they are grounded on the specific constraints faced by biological systems.

Undetectable very-low frequency sound increases dancing at a live concert.

Does low frequency sound (bass) make people dance more? Music that makes people want to move tends to have more low frequency sound, and bass instruments typically provide the musical pulse that people dance to. Low pitches confer advantages in perception and movement timing, and elicit stronger neural responses for timing compared to high pitches, suggesting superior sensorimotor communication. Low frequency sound is processed via vibrotactile and vestibular (in addition to auditory) pathways, and stimulation of these non-auditory modalities in the context of music can increase ratings of groove (the pleasurable urge to move to music), and modulate musical rhythm perception.

Collective dynamics support group drumming, reduce variability, and stabilize tempo drift.

Humans are social animals who engage in a variety of collective activities requiring coordinated action. Among these, music is a defining and ancient aspect of human sociality. Human social interaction has largely been addressed in dyadic paradigms, and it is yet to be determined whether the ensuing conclusions generalize to larger groups.

Creating a shared musical interpretation: Changes in coordination dynamics while learning unfamiliar music together.

The ability to coordinate with others is fundamental for humans to achieve shared goals. Often, harmonious interpersonal coordination requires learning, such as ensemble musicians rehearing together to synchronize their low-level timing and high-level aesthetic musical expressions. We investigated how the coordination dynamics of a professional string quartet changed as they learned unfamiliar pieces together across eight trials.

Classifying Idiopathic Rapid Eye Movement Sleep Behavior Disorder, Controls, and Mild Parkinson's Disease Using Gait Parameters.

Background: Subtle gait changes associated with idiopathic rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder (iRBD) could allow early detection of subjects with future synucleinopathies.

Objective: The aim of this study was to create a multiclass model, using statistical learning from probability distribution of gait parameters, to distinguish between patients with iRBD, healthy control subjects (HCs), and patients with Parkinson's disease (PD).

Methods: Gait parameters were collected in 21 participants with iRBD, 21 with PD, and 21 HCs, matched for age, sex, and education level.

Cross-frequency coupling explains the preference for simple ratios in rhythmic behaviour and the relative stability across non-synchronous patterns.

Rhythms are important for understanding coordinated behaviours in ecological systems. The repetitive nature of rhythms affords prediction, planning of movements and coordination of processes within and between individuals. A major challenge is to understand complex forms of coordination when they differ from complete synchronization.

BeatWalk: Personalized Music-Based Gait Rehabilitation in Parkinson's Disease.

Taking regular walks when living with Parkinson's disease (PD) has beneficial effects on movement and quality of life. Yet, patients usually show reduced physical activity compared to healthy older adults. Using auditory stimulation such as music can facilitate walking but patients vary significantly in their response.

Inferior Auditory Time Perception in Children With Motor Difficulties.

Accurate time perception is crucial for hearing (speech, music) and action (walking, catching). Motor brain regions are recruited during auditory time perception. Therefore, the hypothesis was tested that children (age 6-7) at risk for developmental coordination disorder (rDCD), a neurodevelopmental disorder involving motor difficulties, would show nonmotor auditory time perception deficits.

Collective music listening: Movement energy is enhanced by groove and visual social cues.

The regularity of musical beat makes it a powerful stimulus promoting movement among people. Synchrony can increase interpersonal trust, affiliation, and cooperation. Musical pieces can be classified according to the quality of ; the higher the groove, the more it induces the desire to move.

Effects of footedness and stance asymmetry confirm an inter-leg metastable coordination dynamics of standing posture.

We investigated the patterns of coordination between the left and right legs that support the task of maintaining an upright standing posture. We used cross-wavelet analyses to assess coordination between the centers of pressure under the left and right feet. We recruited participants with a lateralized functional preference for their right leg, and we manipulated whether these participants stood with symmetric/asymmetric stances and whether their eyes were open or closed.

Embodied gestalts: Unstable visual phenomena become stable when they are stimuli for competitive action selection.

An animal's environment is rich with affordances. Different possible actions are specified by visual information while competing for dominance over neural dynamics. Affordance competition models account for this in terms of winner-takes-all cross-inhibition dynamics.

The role of interaction and predictability in the spontaneous entrainment of movement.

People walking side by side spontaneously synchronize their steps on some occasions but not on others, which poses a challenge to theories of perception-action based on interactive dynamic systems. How can action be spontaneously entrained by some sources of perceptual information while others are selectively ignored? The predictive processing framework suggests that saliency factors such as stimulus predictability, consistent deviation, and interactivity of the stimulus control the coupling between the motor system and perceptual information. To test this, we compared entrainment of gait cadence by two interactive auditory stimuli and two noninteractive but predictable, faster than preferred stimuli that were isochronous or statistically matched to gait.

Multi-Scale Coordination of Distinctive Movement Patterns During Embodied Interaction Between Adults With High-Functioning Autism and Neurotypicals.

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can be understood as a social interaction disorder. This requires researchers to take a "second-person" stance and to use experimental setups based on bidirectional interactions. The present work offers a quantitative description of movement patterns exhibited during computer-mediated real-time sensorimotor interaction in 10 dyads of adult participants, each consisting of one control individual (CTRL) and one individual with high-functioning autism (HFA).

Optimizing beat synchronized running to music.

The use of music and specifically tempo-matched music has been shown to affect running performance. But can we maximize the synchronization of movements to music and does maximum synchronization influence kinematics and motivation? In this study, we explore the effect of different types of music-to-movement alignment strategies on phase coherence, cadence and motivation. These strategies were compared to a control condition where the music tempo was deliberately not aligned to the running cadence.

Entraining chaotic dynamics: A novel movement sonification paradigm could promote generalization.

Tasks encountered in daily living may have instabilities and more dimensions than are sampled by the senses such as when carrying a cup of coffee and only the surface motion and overall momentum are sensed, not the fluid dynamics. Anticipating non-periodic dynamics is difficult but not impossible because mutual coordination allows for chaotic processes to synchronize to each other and become periodic. A chaotic oscillator with random period and amplitude affords being stabilized onto a periodic trajectory by a weak input if the driver incorporates information about the oscillator.

Individualization of music-based rhythmic auditory cueing in Parkinson's disease.

Gait dysfunctions in Parkinson's disease can be partly relieved by rhythmic auditory cueing. This consists in asking patients to walk with a rhythmic auditory stimulus such as a metronome or music. The effect on gait is visible immediately in terms of increased speed and stride length.

Predictive rhythmic tapping to isochronous and tempo changing metronomes in the nonhuman primate.

Beat entrainment is the ability to entrain one's movements to a perceived periodic stimulus, such as a metronome or a pulse in music. Humans have a capacity to predictively respond to a periodic pulse and to dynamically adjust their movement timing to match the varying music tempos. Previous studies have shown that monkeys share some of the human capabilities for rhythmic entrainment, such as tapping regularly at the period of isochronous stimuli.

Walking to a multisensory beat.

Living in a complex and multisensory environment demands constant interaction between perception and action. In everyday life it is common to combine efficiently simultaneous signals coming from different modalities. There is evidence of a multisensory benefit in a variety of laboratory tasks (temporal judgement, reaction time tasks).

Time-Series Analysis of Embodied Interaction: Movement Variability and Complexity Matching As Dyadic Properties.

There is a growing consensus that a fuller understanding of social cognition depends on more systematic studies of real-time social interaction. Such studies require methods that can deal with the complex dynamics taking place at multiple interdependent temporal and spatial scales, spanning sub-personal, personal, and dyadic levels of analysis. We demonstrate the value of adopting an extended multi-scale approach by re-analyzing movement time-series generated in a study of embodied dyadic interaction in a minimal virtual reality environment (a perceptual crossing experiment).

The role of environmental constraints in walking: Effects of steering and sharp turns on gait dynamics.

Stride durations in gait exhibit long-range correlation (LRC) which tends to disappear with certain movement disorders. The loss of LRC has been hypothesized to result from a reduction of functional degrees of freedom of the neuromuscular apparatus. A consequence of this theory is that environmental constraints such as the ones induced during constant steering may also reduce LRC.