Biology subjects

Pazart, L.

Publications and source records attributed to Pazart, L..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2024

A Measure of Event-Related Potentials (ERP) Indices of Motivation During Cycling

Although motivation is a central aspect of the practice of a physical activity, it is a challenging endeavour to predict an individuals level of motivation during the activity. The objective of this study was to assess the feasibility of measuring motivation through brain recording methods during physical activity, with a specific focus on cycling. The experiment employed the Effort Expenditure for Reward Task (EEfRT), a decision-making task based on effort and reward, conducted under two conditions: one involving cycling on an ergometer at moderate intensity and the other without cycling. The P300, an event-related potential linked to motivation, was recorded using electroencephalography. A total of 20 participants were recruited to complete the EEfRT, which involved making effort-based decisions of increasing difficulty in order to receive varying levels of monetary reward. The results demonstrated that the P300 amplitude was influenced by the act of cycling, exhibiting a reduction during the cycling session. This reduction may be explained by a reallocation of cognitive resources due to the exertion of physical effort, which is consistent with the transient hypofrontality theory. In terms of behaviour, participants demonstrated a tendency to make more challenging choices when the potential rewards were higher or the probability of gaining them was lower. This pattern was observed in both the cycling and non-cycling conditions. A positive correlation was identified between P300 amplitude and the proportion of difficult choices, particularly under conditions of low reward probability. This suggests that P300 may serve as a neural marker of motivation. The study demonstrates the feasibility of using electroencephalography to monitor motivation during exercise in real-time, with potential applications in rehabilitation settings. However, further research is required to refine the design and explore the effects of different exercise types on motivation.

neuroscience↗

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

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↗