Manczurowsky Julia, Cline Trevor L, Hillman Charles H, Hasson Christopher J
Department of Physical Therapy, Movement and Rehabilitation Sciences, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States.
Department of Psychology, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States.
J Neurophysiol. 2024 Dec 1;132(6):1823-1836. doi: 10.1152/jn.00209.2024. Epub 2024 Oct 23.
Neuromotor disorders can degrade one's ability to locomote and attend to salient stimuli in the environment. Many disorders are physiologically complex, making it difficult to tease apart interactions between motor adaptation and executive function processes. We address this challenge by giving participants a controlled artificial impairment, using electrical stimulation to produce an uncomfortable disruption in normal muscular coordination during locomotion. While adapting to this gait perturbation, participants performed an executive function task containing neutral and affectively charged stimuli. The artificial impairment was counterbalanced against control and sham (discomfort-only stimulation) walking conditions. Our twofold hypothesis that discomfort would selectively tax hot, emotionally charged executive function and motor adaptation would challenge cold, logical executive function was not supported. However, we found that the discomfort experienced with both stimulation conditions improved participants' ability to inhibit distracting information, enhancing this aspect of executive function, and the effect did not depend on whether the task was affectively charged. Moderate discomfort during physical activity may have improved inhibitory control by increasing arousal, a known factor mediating executive function. These results show that using a sensorimotor perturbation that acts internally and bridges multiple physiological domains, including discomfort, can reveal effects not seen with purely environmental manipulations. The broader implications are that when high cognitive performance is needed during physical activity, it may be beneficial to, quite literally, operate outside one's comfort zone. When locomotor and cognitive tasks compete for shared neural resources, cognitive-motor interference may impair performance in both domains. To understand how impairments that cause pain or change neuromotor control impact cognition during locomotion, we gave healthy adults an uncomfortable, artificial neuromuscular impairment while they walked and completed a task dependent on ignoring distracting stimuli. We found that discomfort enhanced participants' ability to ignore distractions, providing new insight into the mediators of cognition during impaired movement.
神经运动障碍会降低一个人的运动能力以及对环境中显著刺激的注意力。许多障碍在生理上很复杂，难以区分运动适应和执行功能过程之间的相互作用。我们通过给参与者一种可控的人为损伤来应对这一挑战，即利用电刺激在运动过程中对正常肌肉协调产生不适干扰。在适应这种步态扰动的同时，参与者执行一项包含中性和情感性刺激的执行功能任务。人为损伤与对照和假刺激（仅产生不适的刺激）步行条件相互平衡。我们提出的双重假设，即不适会选择性地消耗热烈、充满情感的执行功能，而运动适应会挑战冷静、逻辑的执行功能，并未得到支持。然而，我们发现，两种刺激条件下所体验到的不适提高了参与者抑制干扰信息的能力，增强了执行功能的这一方面，而且这种效果并不取决于任务是否带有情感色彩。体育活动期间的适度不适可能通过增加唤醒水平改善了抑制控制，唤醒是调节执行功能的一个已知因素。这些结果表明，使用一种在内部起作用并跨越多个生理领域（包括不适）的感觉运动扰动，可以揭示纯环境操纵所未见的效果。更广泛的意义在于，当体育活动需要高认知表现时，从字面上讲，在舒适区之外操作可能是有益的。当运动和认知任务争夺共享神经资源时，认知 - 运动干扰可能会损害两个领域的表现。为了了解导致疼痛或改变神经运动控制的损伤如何在运动过程中影响认知，我们让健康成年人在行走时接受一种不适的人为神经肌肉损伤，并完成一项依赖于忽略干扰刺激的任务。我们发现，不适增强了参与者忽略干扰的能力，为受损运动期间认知的调节因素提供了新的见解。
