Our social world has been transformed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Beyond the direct impact of the pandemic on physical health, the social distancing measures implemented worldwide to slow down disease ...transmission have dramatically impacted social interactions1,2. These measures, including orders to stay at home and to maintain a social distance of at least 2 meters, have been essential to limit the spread of the disease, but they have had severe costs for humans as social animals2. Right before and right after the adoption of the most stringent measures in Switzerland in Spring 2020, we were conducting a series of experiments to measure the representation of the so-called peripersonal space — the space immediately surrounding our body, where we normally interact with objects and other individuals3. We found that the introduction of social distancing measures led to a reduction in the extent of the peripersonal space and enhanced its segregation between individuals, as if the presence of others in close space would activate an implicit form of freezing response.
Serino et al. investigate how the COVID-19 pandemic and social distancing measures affect the peripersonal space — the space of body–environment interactions. Results show that peripersonal space shrank in participants tested after the first stringent pandemic lockdown and demonstrate an enhanced segregation in response to other individuals.
Highlights • Our results highlighted that spatial deficits appear in the earliest stages of the disease. • There is a need for a more ecologic evaluation of the spatial functions. • Our analysis ...suggested that a prevalence of allocentric impairment exists. • A more specific deficit is found in the translation between different spatial reference frames.
eHealth interventions are recognized to have a tremendous potential to promote patient engagement. To date, the majority of studies examine the efficacy of eHealth in enhancing clinical outcomes ...without focusing on patient engagement in its specificity. This paper aimed at reviewing findings from the literature about the use of eHealth in engaging patients in their own care process. We undertook a comprehensive literature search within the peer-reviewed international literature. Eleven studies met the inclusion criteria. eHealth interventions reviewed were mainly devoted to foster only partial dimensions of patient engagement (i.e., alternatively cognitive, emotional or behavioral domains related to healthcare management), thus failing to consider the complexity of such an experience. This also led to a great heterogeneity of technologies, assessed variables and achieved outcomes. This systematic review underlines the need for a more holistic view of patient needs to actually engage them in eHealth interventions and obtaining positive outcomes. In this sense, patient engagement constitute a new frontiers for healthcare models where eHealth could maximize its potentialities.
It is not unusual to experience a sense of total absorption, concentration, action-awareness, distortion of time and intrinsic enjoyment during an activity that involves music. Indeed, it is noted ...that there is a special relationship between these two aspects (i.e., music and flow experience). In order to deeply explore flow in the musical domain, it is crucial to consider the complexity of the flow experience-both as a "state" and as a "trait." Secondly, since music is a multifaceted domain, it is necessary to concentrate on specific music settings, such as (i) musical composition; (ii) listening; and (iii) musical performance. To address these issues, the current review aims to outline flow experience as a "trait" and as a "state" in the three above-mentioned musical domains. Clear and useful guidelines to distinguish between flow as a "state" and as a "trait" are provided by literature concerning flow assessment. For this purpose, three aspects of the selected studies are discussed and analyzed: (i) the characteristics of the flow assessments used; (ii) the experimental design; (iii) the results; and (iv) the interrelations between the three domains. Results showed that the dispositional approach is predominant in the above-mentioned settings, mainly regarding music performance. Several aspects concerning musical contexts still need to be deeply analyzed. Future challenges could include the role of a group level of analysis, overcoming a frequency approach toward dispositional flow, and integrating both state and dispositional flow perspectives in order to deepen comprehension of how flow takes place in musical contexts. Finally, to explain the complex relationship between these two phenomena, we suggest that music and flow could be seen as an emergent embodied system.
Cardiovascular diseases represent a significant cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide, and an unhealthy lifestyle notoriously accounts for a large percentage of their risk. Identifying resources ...to stimulate lifestyle changes is an essential goal of primary and secondary cardiovascular prevention. Self‐efficacy beliefs are among the major psychological factors proven to impact health status and lifestyle. This study aimed to confirm the role of self‐efficacy beliefs by investigating their associations over 5 years of adherence to healthy lifestyles in terms of diet and physical activity in a sample of 275 newly diagnosed patients with acute coronary syndrome. Longitudinal profiles of lifestyles and self‐efficacy beliefs in their improvement were identified through latent class growth analysis. Correlations were then performed to explore the associations between lifestyles and self‐efficacy trajectories. Results showed a positive association between virtuous lifestyle profiles and high self‐efficacy in implementing behavioural change. Finally, two logistic regressions were performed to test the hypothesis that a high self‐efficacy profile would predict better lifestyles 5 years after the coronary event. This hypothesis was confirmed for diet. Overall, current findings confirm the importance of implementing repeated psychological interventions that promote patients' efficacy beliefs in self‐regulating their behaviour changes over time.
This experiment is aimed at understanding how egocentric experiences, allocentric viewpoint-dependent representations, and allocentric viewpoint-independent representations interact when encoding and ...retrieving a spatial environment. Although several cognitive theories have highlighted the interaction between reference frames, it is less clear about the role of a real-time presentation of allocentric viewpoint-dependent representation on the spatial organization of information. Sixty participants were asked to navigate in two virtual cities to memorize the position of one hidden object. Half of the participants had the possibility to visualize the virtual city with an interactive aerial view. Then, they were required to find the position of the object in three different experimental conditions (“retrieval with an interactive aerial view” vs. “retrieval on a map” vs. “retrieval without an interactive aerial view”). Results revealed that participants were significantly more precise in retrieving the position of the object when immersed in an egocentric experience with the interactive aerial view. The retrieval of spatial information is facilitated by the presence of the interactive aerial view of the city, since it provides a real-time allocentric viewpoint-dependent representation. More participants with high preference for using cardinal points tend to be more accurate when they were asked to retrieve the position of the object on the map. As suggested by the mental frame syncing hypothesis, the presence of an allocentric viewpoint-dependent representation during the retrieval seems to ease the imposition on a specific viewpoint on the stored abstract allocentric viewpoint-independent representation. Our findings represent another significant step toward the comprehension of the organization of spatial representations of our environment.
Progress in medical science and technology drastically improved physicians' ability to interact with patient's physical body. Nevertheless, medicine still addresses the human body from a Hippocratic ...point of view, considering the organism and its processes just as a matter of mechanics and fluids. However, the interaction between the cognitive neuroscience of bodily self-consciousness (BSC), fundamentally rooted in the integration of multisensory bodily inputs, with virtual reality (VR), haptic technologies and robotics is giving a new meaning to the classic Juvenal's latin dictum "
" (a healthy mind in a healthy body). This vision provides the basis for a new research field, "Embodied Medicine": the use of advanced technologies for altering the experience of being in a body with the goal of improving health and well-being. Up to now, most of the research efforts in the field have been focused upon how external bodily information is processed and integrated. Despite the important results, we believe that existing bodily illusions still need to be improved to enhance their capability to effectively correct pathological dysfunctions. First, they do not follow the suggestions provided by the free-energy and predictive coding approaches. More, they lacked to consider a peculiar feature of the human body, the multisensory integration of internal inputs (interoceptive, proprioceptive and vestibular) that constitute our inner body dimension. So, a future challenge is the integration of simulation/stimulation technologies also able to measure and modulate this internal/inner experience of the body. Finally, we also proposed the concept of "Sonoception" as an extension of this approach. The core idea is to exploit recent technological advances in the acoustic field to use sound and vibrations to modify the internal/inner body experience.
Individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) syndrome often report navigation difficulties, accompanied by impairments in egocentric and allocentric spatial memory. However, studies have shown ...that both bodily (e.g., motor commands, proprioception, vestibular information) and visual-cognitive (e.g., maps, directional arrows, attentional markers) cues can support spatial memory in MCI.
We aimed to assess navigation cues for innovative spatial training in aging.
Fifteen MCI patients were recruited for this study. Their egocentric and allocentric memory recall performances were tested through a navigation task with five different virtual reality (VR) assistive encoding navigation procedures (bodily, vision only, interactive allocentric map, reduced executive load, free navigation without cues). Bodily condition consisted of an immersive VR setup to engage self-motion cues, vision only condition consisted of passive navigation without interaction, in the interactive allocentric map condition patients could use a bird-view map, in the reduced executive load condition directional cues and attentional markers were employed, and during free navigation no aid was implemented.
Bodily condition improved spatial memory compared to vision only and free navigation without cues. In addition, the interactive allocentric map was superior to the free navigation without cues. Surprisingly, the reduced executive load was comparable to vison only condition. Moreover, a detrimental impact of free navigation was observed on allocentric memory across testing trials.
These findings challenge the notion of an amodal representation of space in aging, suggesting that spatial maps can be influenced by the modality in which the environment was originally encoded.
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