Subtle Motor Signs as a Biomarker for Mindful Movement Intervention in Children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.

OBJECTIVE: Previous studies of Tai Chi or mindfulness-based interventions in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have relied on self- or parent-reported outcome measures; however, there is a critical need for the validation of objective biomarkers of treatment. Therefore, we implemented a mindful movement intervention for children with ADHD, hypothesizing that an ADHD-relevant motor control measure could serve as a predictive biomarker of treatment-related improvement. METHODS: Thirty-four participants were included, 8 to 12 year olds diagnosed with DSM-5 ADHD. Participants engaged in the mindful movement treatment, an 8-week program with 2 classes a week for 60 minutes. At pre- and post-treatment, ADHD symptoms and associated impairment and motor control via the Physical and Neurological Examination for Subtle Signs (PANESS) were assessed. RESULTS: The results showed a significant reduction for PANESS Gaits and Station (p ≤ 0.001), total overflow (p = 0.009), and total score (p = 0.001) after treatment, with the largest effect for Gaits and Stations. The results also showed a significant reduction in symptoms of inattention (p ≤ 0.001), hyperactivity/impulsivity (p ≤ 0.001), oppositional defiant disorder (p = 0.001), and executive dysfunction (p ≤ 0.001). There were significant positive correlations between change in PANESS Gaits and Stations and change in both inattentive (p = 0.02) and hyperactive/impulsive symptoms (p = 0.02). There was also a significant positive correlation between change in the PANESS total score and change in inattentive (p = 0.007) and hyperactive/impulsive symptoms (p = 0.042). The change in the PANESS total score (ß = 0.295, p = 0.002) predicted post-treatment ADHD severity above the change in inattentive or hyperactive/impulsive symptoms. CONCLUSION: The results suggest the effectiveness of a mindful movement treatment on ADHD symptoms and suggest the PANESS as a candidate motor biomarker for future mindful movement trials. CLINICAL TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT02234557, https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02234557.

Evaluating In-Car Movements in the Design of Mindful Commute Interventions: Exploratory Study.

BACKGROUND: The daily commute could be a right moment to teach drivers to use movement or breath towards improving their mental health. Long commutes, the relevance of transitioning from home to work, and vice versa and the privacy of commuting by car make the commute an ideal scenario and time to perform mindful exercises safely. Whereas driving safety is paramount, mindful exercises might help commuters decrease their daily stress while staying alert. Increasing vehicle automation may present new opportunities but also new challenges. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to explore the design space for movement-based mindful interventions for commuters. We used qualitative analysis of simulated driving experiences in combination with simple movements to obtain key design insights. METHODS: We performed a semistructured viability assessment in 2 parts. First, a think-aloud technique was used to obtain information about a driving task. Drivers (N=12) were given simple instructions to complete movements (configural or breath-based) while engaged in either simple (highway) or complex (city) simulated urban driving tasks using autonomous and manual driving modes. Then, we performed a matching exercise where participants could experience vibrotactile patterns from the back of the car seat and map them to the prior movements. RESULTS: We report a summary of individual perceptions concerning different movements and vibrotactile patterns. Beside describing situations within a drive when it may be more likely to perform movement-based interventions, we also describe movements that may interfere with driving and those that may complement it well. Furthermore, we identify movements that could be conducive to a more relaxing commute and describe vibrotactile patterns that could guide such movements and exercises. We discuss implications for design such as the influence of driving modality on the adoption of movement, need for personal customization, the influence that social perception has on participants, and the potential role of prior awareness of mindful techniques in the adoption of new movement-based interventions. CONCLUSIONS: This exploratory study provides insights into which types of movements could be better suited to design mindful interventions to reduce stress for commuters, when to encourage such movements, and how best to guide them using noninvasive haptic stimuli embedded in the car seat.

Climate Change Conceptual Change: Scientific Information Can Transform Attitudes.

Of this article's seven experiments, the first five demonstrate that virtually no Americans know the basic global warming mechanism. Fortunately, Experiments 2-5 found that 2-45 min of physical-chemical climate instruction durably increased such understandings. This mechanistic learning, or merely receiving seven highly germane statistical facts (Experiment 6), also increased climate-change acceptance-across the liberal-conservative spectrum. However, Experiment 7's misleading statistics decreased such acceptance (and dramatically, knowledge-confidence). These readily available attitudinal and conceptual changes through scientific information disconfirm what we term "stasis theory"--which some researchers and many laypeople varyingly maintain. Stasis theory subsumes the claim that informing people (particularly Americans) about climate science may be largely futile or even counterproductive--a view that appears historically naïve, suffers from range restrictions (e.g., near-zero mechanistic knowledge), and/or misinterprets some polarization and (noncausal) correlational data. Our studies evidenced no polarizations. Finally, we introduce HowGlobalWarmingWorks.org--a website designed to directly enhance public "climate-change cognition."

Mindful movement and skilled attention.

Bodily movement has long been employed as a foundation for cultivating mental skills such as attention, self-control or mindfulness, with recent studies documenting the positive impacts of mindful movement training, such as yoga and tai chi. A parallel "mind-body connection" has also been observed in many developmental disorders. We elaborate a spectrum of mindfulness by considering ADHD, in which deficient motor control correlates with impaired (disinhibited) behavioral control contributing to defining features of excessive distractibility and impulsivity. These data provide evidence for an important axis of variation for wellbeing, in which skillful cognitive control covaries with a capacity for skillful movement. We review empirical and theoretical literature on attention, cognitive control, mind wandering, mindfulness and skill learning, endorsing a model of skilled attention in which motor plans, attention, and executive goals are seen as mutually co-defining aspects of skilled behavior that are linked by reciprocal inhibitory and excitatory connections. Thus, any movement training should engage "higher-order" inhibition and selection and develop a repertoire of rehearsed procedures that coordinate goals, attention and motor plans. However, we propose that mindful movement practice may improve the functional quality of rehearsed procedures, cultivating a transferrable skill of attention. We adopt Langer's spectrum of mindful learning that spans from "mindlessness" to engagement with the details of the present task and contrast this with the mental attitudes cultivated in standard mindfulness meditation. We particularly follow Feldenkrais' suggestion that mindful learning of skills for organizing the body in movement might transfer to other forms of mental activity. The results of mindful movement training should be observed in multiple complementary measures, and may have tremendous potential benefit for individuals with ADHD and other populations.

Nipype: a flexible, lightweight and extensible neuroimaging data processing framework in python.

Current neuroimaging software offer users an incredible opportunity to analyze their data in different ways, with different underlying assumptions. Several sophisticated software packages (e.g., AFNI, BrainVoyager, FSL, FreeSurfer, Nipy, R, SPM) are used to process and analyze large and often diverse (highly multi-dimensional) data. However, this heterogeneous collection of specialized applications creates several issues that hinder replicable, efficient, and optimal use of neuroimaging analysis approaches: (1) No uniform access to neuroimaging analysis software and usage information; (2) No framework for comparative algorithm development and dissemination; (3) Personnel turnover in laboratories often limits methodological continuity and training new personnel takes time; (4) Neuroimaging software packages do not address computational efficiency; and (5) Methods sections in journal articles are inadequate for reproducing results. To address these issues, we present Nipype (Neuroimaging in Python: Pipelines and Interfaces; http://nipy.org/nipype), an open-source, community-developed, software package, and scriptable library. Nipype solves the issues by providing Interfaces to existing neuroimaging software with uniform usage semantics and by facilitating interaction between these packages using Workflows. Nipype provides an environment that encourages interactive exploration of algorithms, eases the design of Workflows within and between packages, allows rapid comparative development of algorithms and reduces the learning curve necessary to use different packages. Nipype supports both local and remote execution on multi-core machines and clusters, without additional scripting. Nipype is Berkeley Software Distribution licensed, allowing anyone unrestricted usage. An open, community-driven development philosophy allows the software to quickly adapt and address the varied needs of the evolving neuroimaging community, especially in the context of increasing demand for reproducible research.

Multiple systems for motor skill learning.

Motor learning is a ubiquitous feature of human competence. This review focuses on two particular classes of model tasks for studying skill acquisition. The serial reaction time (SRT) task is used to probe how people learn sequences of actions, while adaptation in the context of visuomotor or force field perturbations serves to illustrate how preexisting movements are recalibrated in novel environments. These tasks highlight important issues regarding the representational changes that occur during the course of motor learning. One important theme is that distinct mechanisms vary in their information processing costs during learning and performance. Fast learning processes may require few trials to produce large changes in performance but impose demands on cognitive resources. Slower processes are limited in their ability to integrate complex information but minimally demanding in terms of attention or processing resources. The representations derived from fast systems may be accessible to conscious processing and provide a relatively greater measure of flexibility, while the representations derived from slower systems are more inflexible and automatic in their behavior. In exploring these issues, we focus on how multiple neural systems may interact and compete during the acquisition and consolidation of new behaviors. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Motor Skill and Performance.

Enhanced intersubject correlations during movie viewing correlate with successful episodic encoding.

While much has been learned regarding the neural substrates supporting episodic encoding using highly controlled experimental protocols, relatively little is known regarding the neural bases of episodic encoding of real-world events. In an effort to examine this issue, we measured fMRI activity while observers viewed a novel TV sitcom. Three weeks later, subsequent memory (SM) for the narrative content of movie events was assessed. We analyzed the encoding data for intersubject correlations (ISC) based on subjects' subsequent memory (ISC-SM) performance to identify brain regions whose BOLD response is significantly more correlated across subjects during portions of the movie that are successfully as compared to unsuccessfully encoded. These regions include the parahippocampal gyrus, superior temporal gyrus, anterior temporal poles, and the temporal-parietal junction. Further analyses reveal (1) that these correlated regions can display distinct activation profiles and (2) that the results seen with the ISC-SM analysis are complementary to more traditional linear models and allow analysis of complex time course data. Thus, the ISC-SM analysis extends traditional subsequent memory findings to a rich, dynamic and more ecologically valid situation.

Transient disruption of ventrolateral prefrontal cortex during verbal encoding affects subsequent memory performance.

Episodic memory supports conscious remembrance of everyday experience. Prior functional neuroimaging data indicate that episodic encoding during phonological task performance is correlated with activation in bilateral posterior ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (pVLPFC), although uncertainty remains regarding whether these prefrontal regions make necessary contributions to episodic memory formation. Using functional MRI data to guide application of single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (spTMS), this study examined the necessity of left and right pVLPFC for episodic encoding (as expressed through subsequent memory performance). To assess the timing of critical computations, pVLPFC function was transiently disrupted at different poststimulus onset times while subjects made syllable decisions about visually presented familiar and unfamiliar words; subsequent memory for these stimuli was measured. Results revealed that left pVLPFC disruption during encoding of familiar words impaired subsequent memory, expressed as a decline in recognition confidence, with disruption being maximal at 380 ms after stimulus onset. In contrast, right pVLPFC disruption facilitated subsequent memory for familiar words, expressed as an increase in medium confidence recognition, with this facilitation being maximal at 380 ms. Finally, phonological (syllable) decision accuracy was facilitated by right pVLPFC disruption, with this effect being maximal at 340 ms, but was unaffected by left pVLPFC disruption. These findings suggest that left pVLPFC mechanisms onset between 300 and 400 ms during phonological processing of words, with these mechanisms appearing necessary for effective episodic encoding. In contrast, disruption of correlated mechanisms in right pVLPFC facilitates encoding, perhaps by inducing a functional shift in the mechanisms engaged during learning.

Assembling and encoding word representations: fMRI subsequent memory effects implicate a role for phonological control.

Novel word learning is central to the flexibility inherent in the human language capacity. Word learning may partially depend on long-term memory formation during the assembly of phonological representations from orthographic inputs. In the present study, event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) examined the contributions of phonological control-a component of the verbal working memory system-to phonological assembly and word learning. Subjects were scanned while making syllable decisions about visually presented familiar (English) and novel (pseudo-English and Foreign) words, a task that required retrieval and analysis of existing phonological codes or the assembly and analysis of novel representations. Results revealed that left inferior prefrontal cortex (LIPC) and bilateral parietal cortices were differentially engaged during the processing of novel words, suggesting that this circuit is recruited during phonological assembly. A subsequent memory analysis that examined the relation between fMRI signal and the subject's ability to later remember the words (a measure of effective memory formation) revealed that the magnitude of activation in LIPC, bilateral superior parietal, and left inferior parietal cortices was positively correlated with later memory. Moreover, although the magnitude of the subsequent memory effect in parietal cortex was not significantly affected by word type, this effect was greater in posterior LIPC for novel (pseudo-English) than for familiar (English) words. In the course of subserving the assembly of novel word representations, the phonological (articulatory) control component of the phonological system appears to play a central role in the encoding of novel words into long-term memory.