Biology subjects

Chabin, T.

Publications and source records attributed to Chabin, T..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Inter- and Intra-individual Variability in Oral Food Processing and Its Impact on Aroma Release

Aroma perception during food consumption results from the combined effects of food composition, oral processing (such as chewing and saliva action), the release and transport of volatile compounds toward the olfactory epithelium, followed by cognitive integration in the brain. Recent advances in real-time analytical techniques, particularly Proton Transfer Reaction-Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometry (PTR-ToF-MS), enable in vivo monitoring of aroma release with high temporal resolution and have become widely used for analyzing the composition of exhaled air. However, the interpretation of aroma release kinetics remains challenging due to substantial intra- and inter-individual variability caused by differences in physiology, anatomy, oral behavior, and respiratory patterns. In this context, the present study was designed to quantify aroma release associated with different food oral processing (FOP) mechanisms, such as chewing and swallowing, using simple model matrices containing a single aroma compound, and to document inter- and intra-individual variability among subjects. Real-time PTR-MS measurements were combined with self-reported oral events and simultaneous respiratory monitoring to analyze aroma release from aqueous solutions and gummy discs flavored with isoamyl acetate. The results showed that inter-individual variability was higher than intra-individual variability and allowed its quantification in aroma release. Significant differences in aroma release kinetics were observed depending on FOP protocols. The importance of considering swallowing events when analyzing aroma release data was also highlighted.

systems biology↗

bioRxiv2021

Your pleasure is mine; when people share amusical emotional experience during a livemusic performance in a concert hall.

Over the years, several publications have proposed that musical sound could be an ancestral emotional way of communication, thus positing an ancestral biological function for music. Understanding how musical emotions, and the pleasure derived from music regardless of the musical valence, can be shared between individuals is a fascinating question, and investigating it can shed light on the function of musical reward. Is the pleasure felt at the individual level transmitted on a collective level? And if so, how? We investigated these questions in a natural setting during an international competition for orchestra conductors. Participants (n=15) used a dedicated smartphone app to report their subjective emotional experiences in real time during a concert. We recorded participants electrodermal activity (EDA) and cerebral activity with electroencephalography (EEG). The overall behavioral real time ratings suggest a possible social influence on the reported and felt pleasure. The physically closer the participants, the more similar their reported pleasure. We estimated the inter-individual cerebral coherence, which indicates the degree of mutual cerebral information between pairs of participants in the frequency domain. The results show that when people simultaneously reported either high or low pleasure, their cerebral activities were closer than for simultaneous neutral pleasure reports. Participants skin conductance levels were also more coupled when reporting higher emotional degrees simultaneously. More importantly, the participants who were physically closer had higher cerebral coherence, but only when they simultaneously reported intense pleasure. We propose that mechanisms of emotional contagion and/or emotional resonance could explain why a form of emotional connecting force could arise between people.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2019

An artistic approach to neurofeedback for emotion regulation

Neurofeedback has been shown to be a promising tool for learning to regulate ones own emotions in healthy populations and in neuropsychiatric disorders. While it has been suggested that neurofeedback performance improves when sensory feedback is related to the pathology under consideration, it is still difficult to represent in real time a proper feedback representative of our emotional state. Since emotion is a central part of peoples dealings with artworks, we have initiated a collaboration between neuroscientists and artists to develop a visual representation of emotions that can be used in neurofeedback experiences. As a result of this collaboration, emotions were represented as particles, moving in a white sphere according to valence and arousal levels. In this study, several possibilities for particle control were explored: direction of particles, their concentration in a specific place, or their gravity. 107 participants evaluated these performances, either in laboratory condition or at various scientific and artistic events. At the end of the experiment, questionnaires were distributed to participants who were asked to indicate on scales ranging from 0 to 5 how artistic the different representations were and could be used as a clinical activity, whether they thought they had successfully controlled the particles during the neurofeedback exercise, and whether they had appreciated the experience. We found that influing on the direction and concentration of particles was considered the most artistic with an average score around 3/5. 47% of the participants considered the concentration of particles as artistic. In addition, although this is not the purpose of this study, we found that participants could significantly control the direction of particles during this session. These encouraging results constitute a first step before evaluating the effectiveness of our emotional neurofeedback over several sessions in healthy, then pathological populations.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2019

Modeling decision-making under uncertainty: a direct comparison study between human and mouse gambling data

Decision-making is a conserved evolutionary process enabling to choose one option among several alternatives, and relying on reward and cognitive control systems. The Iowa Gambling Task allows to assess human decision-making under uncertainty by presenting four cards decks with various cost-benefit probabilities. Participants seek to maximize their monetary gains by developing long-term optimal choice strategies. Animal versions have been adapted with nutritional rewards but interspecies data comparisons are still scarce. Our study directly compared physiological decision-making performances between humans and wild-type C57BL/6 mice. Human subjects fulfilled an electronic Iowa Gambling Task version while mice performed a maze-based adaptation with four arms baited in a probabilistic way. Our data show closely matching performances among species with similar patterns of choice behaviors. Moreover, both populations clustered into good, intermediate, and poor decision-making categories with similar proportions. Remarkably, mice good decision-makers behaved as humans of the same category, but slight differences among species have been evidenced for the other two subpopulations. Overall, our direct comparative study confirms the good face validity of the rodent gambling task. Extended behavioral characterization and pathological animal models should help strengthen its construct validity and disentangle determinants of decision-making in animals and humans.

neuroscience↗