The purpose of this study was to investigate how attentional focus on body sway affects postural control during quiet standing. To address this issue, sixteen young healthy adults were asked to stand upright as immobile as possible on a force platform in both Control and Attention conditions. In the latter condition, participants were instructed to deliberately focus their attention on their body sways and to increase their active intervention into postural control. The critical analysis was focused on elementary motions computed from the centre of pressure (CoP) trajectories: (1) the vertical projection of the centre of gravity (CoG(v)) and (2) the difference between CoP and CoG(v) (CoP-CoG(v)). The former is recognised as an index of performance in this postural task, whilst the latter constitutes a fair expression of the ankle joint stiffness and is linked to the level of neuromuscular activity of the lower limb muscles required for controlling posture. A frequency-domain analysis showed increased amplitudes and frequencies of CoP-CoG(v) motions in the Attention relative to the Control condition, whereas non-significant changes were observed for the CoG(v) motions. Altogether, the present findings suggest that attentional focus on body sway, induced by the instructions, promoted the use of less automatic control process and hampered the efficiency for controlling posture during quiet standing.
This experiment was designed to investigate whether and how decreasing the amount of attentional focus invested in postural control could affect bipedal postural control. Twelve participants were asked to stand upright as immobile as possible on a force platform in one control condition and one cognitive condition. In the latter condition, they performed a short-term digit-span memory task. Decreased center-of-gravity displacements and decreased center-of-foot-pressure displacements minus center-of-gravity displacements were observed in the cognitive condition relative to the control condition. These results suggest that shifting the attentional focus away from postural control by executing a concurrent attention-demanding task could increase postural performance and postural efficiency.
The aim of this study was to determine the extent to which an attention-demanding visuomotor task affects the strength of the inhibitory control exerted by the wrist flexor group Ia afferents on the wrist extensor motoneurons. Effects of median nerve stimulation on the tonic activity of wrist extensor single motor units were analyzed in terms of the interspike interval (ISI) lengthening. Results show that the inhibitory effects exerted by the antagonistic group Ia afferents were significantly enhanced when the wrist extensor motoneurons were involved in an attention-demanding task. Enhanced inhibition from antagonist afferents may reflect task-related changes in the excitability of the di- and/or polysynaptic pathways mediating reciprocal inhibition due to either the action of descending inputs and/or an increase in the efficiency of the Ia inputs to the premotoneuronal inhibitory interneurons. Modulation of the inhibition exerted by proprioceptive antagonist afferents may be one of the processes which contribute to the fine adjustment of the wrist muscle force output required in fine handling tasks.
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