Browsing by Author "Vergara, Rodrigo C."

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
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    Cold-Blooded Attention: Finger Temperature Predicts Attentional Performance
    (2017) Vergara, Rodrigo C.; Moenne-Loccoz, Cristobal; Maldonado, Pedro E.
    Thermal stress has been shown to increase the chances of unsafe behavior during industrial and driving performances due to reductions in mental and attentional resources. Nonetheless, establishing appropriate safety standards regarding environmental temperature has been a major problem, as modulations are also be affected by the task type, complexity, workload, duration, and previous experience with the task. To bypass this attentional and thermoregulatory problem, we focused on the body rather than environmental temperature. Specifically, we measured tympanic, forehead, finger and environmental temperatures accompanied by a battery of attentional tasks. We considered a 10 min baseline period wherein subjects were instructed to sit and relax, followed by three attentional tasks: a continuous performance task (CPT), a flanker task (FT) and a counting task (CT). Using multiple linear regression models, we evaluated which variable(s) were the best predictors of performance. The results showed a decrement in finger temperature due to instruction and task engagement that was absent when the subject was instructed to relax. No changes were observed in tympanic or forehead temperatures, while the environmental temperature remained almost constant for each subject. Specifically, the magnitude of the change in finger temperature was the best predictor of performance in all three attentional tasks. The results presented here suggest that finger temperature can be used as a predictor of alertness, as it predicted performance in attentional tasks better than environmental temperature. These findings strongly support that peripheral temperature can be used as a tool to prevent unsafe behaviors and accidents.
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    Corrigendum: The Energy Homeostasis Principle: Neuronal Energy Regulation Drives Local Network Dynamics Generating Behavior
    (Frontiers Media SA, 2020) Vergara, Rodrigo C.; Jaramillo-Riveri, Sebastián; Luarte, Alejandro; Moenne Vargas, Cristóbal Matías; Fuentes, Rómulo; Couve C., Andrés; Maldonado, Pedro E.
    This article is a correction to: The Energy Homeostasis Principle: Neuronal Energy Regulation Drives Local Network Dynamics Generating Behavior
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    Data from the Human Penguin Project, a cross-national dataset testing social thermoregulation principles
    (2019) Hu, Chuan-Peng; Yin, Ji-Xing; Lindenberg, Siegwart; Dargar, Ilker; Weissgerber, Sophia C.; Vergara, Rodrigo C.; Cairo, Athena H.; Colic, Marija, V; Dursun, Pinar; Frankowska, Natalia; Hadi, Rhonda; Hall, Calvin J.; Hong, Youngki; Joy-Gaba, Jennifer; Lazarevic, Dusanka; Lazarevic, Ljiljana B.; Parzuchowski, Michal; Ratner, Kyle G.; Rothman, David; Sim, Samantha; Simao, Claudia; Song, Mengdi; Stojilovic, Darko; Blomster, Johanna K.; Brito, Rodrigo; Hennecke, Marie; Jaume-Guazzini, Francisco; Schubert, Thomas W.; Schuetz, Astrid; Seibt, Beate; Zickfeld, Janis H.; Jzerman, Hans, I
    In the Human Penguin Project (N = 1755), 15 research groups from 12 countries collected body temperature, demographic variables, social network indices, seven widely-used psychological scales and two newly developed questionnaires (the Social Thermoregulation and Risk Avoidance Questionnaire (STRAQ-1) and the Kama Muta Frequency Scale (KAMF)). They were collected to investigate the relationship between environmental factors (e.g., geographical, climate etc.) and human behaviors, which is a long-standing inquiry in the scientific community. More specifically, the present project was designed to test principles surrounding the idea of social thermoregulation, which posits that social networks help people to regulate their core body temperature. The results showed that all scales in the current project have sufficient to good psychometrical properties. Unlike previous crowdsourced projects, this dataset includes not only the cleaned raw data but also all the validation of questionnaires in 9 different languages, thus providing a valuable resource for psychological scientists who are interested in cross-national, environment-human interaction studies.
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    Development and Validation of the Social Thermoregulation and Risk Avoidance Questionnaire (STRAQ-1)
    (2019) Vergara, Rodrigo C.; Hernandez, Cristobal; Jaume-Guazzini, Francisco; Lindenberg, Siegwart; Klein, Richard A.; IJzerman, Hans
    Attachment theory was built around the idea that infants rely on others to survive, and it is often forgotten that survival hinged on coping with environmental demands. Adult attachment reports have instead been organized around people's subjective experience of safety and security in relationships. To resolve the gap between infant's physical needs and adult attachment experiences, we made a first step by developing the Social Thermoregulation and Risk Avoidance Questionnaire (STRAQ-1) in 12 countries (N = 1510), providing a complementary measure to identify biological drives formative to attachment. We conjectured that co-regulatory patterns of temperature and stress are foundational to attachment styles and on this basis used a naive bootstrapping method to find a robust solution, conducting seven exploratory factor analyses in an exploratory-confirmatory fashion. We identified 23 (out of 57) items in 4 subscales: Social Thermoregulation (Total Omega = .83), High Temperature Sensitivity (.83), Solitary Thermoregulation (.77), and Risk Avoidance (.57). In terms of external validity, we also found that the STRAQ-1 relates to emotion regulation strategies broadly and, importantly, relates to individual differences in attachment specifically, which in turn mediates the relationship with stress and health (making the scale face valid). Our approach provides a robust first effort in identifying biological mechanisms underlying attachment formation.
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    Effects of the self-perceived sensorimotor demand and immersion during video gaming on visual-attention skills
    (Wiley, 2023) Moenne Vargas, Cristóbal Matías; Hernández, Alfredo; Larraguibel, Camila; Lam, Gustavo; Lorca-Ponce, Enrique; Montefusco-Siegmund, Rodrigo; Maldonado, Pedro; Vergara, Rodrigo C.
    Playing specific genres of video games (e.g., action video games) has been linked to improvements in cognitive skills mostly related to attentional phenomena. Nonetheless, do video games have features or dimensions in common that impact cognitive improvements beyond the game genre? Here, we argue that the sensorimotor demand-the amount of demand for precise coordination between movement and perception-is a key element in the improvements associated with playing video games. We conducted a two-part study to test this hypothesis: a self-report online gaming instrument development and validation and an in-lab behavioural and electrophysiological study. In the first study, data from 209 participants were used to devise the sensorimotor demand instrument (SMDI). The SMDI was split into three dimensions of video game playing: sensorimotor contingency, immersion and unfocused gaming. Criterion validity related to video gamers' characteristics supported that the SMDI is sensitive to the input device (e.g., keyboard or touchscreens), and the most recent experience gained during gaming sessions while not being sensitive to the game genre. In the second study, data from 20 participants who performed four visual-attentional tasks previously reported in the literature showed that the SMDI's dimensions were associated with behavioural performance measures and the latency and amplitude of event-related potentials (N1, P2 and P3). Despite the challenge of studying the video gamer population, our study remarks on the relevance of sensorimotor demands in the performance of attentional tasks and its potential use as a dimension to characterize the experience of playing video games beyond the game genre.
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    Modeling Search Behaviors during the Acquisition of Expertise in a Sequential Decision-Making Task
    (2017) Moenne Vargas, Cristóbal Matías; Vergara, Rodrigo C.; López Hernández, Vladimir; Mery Quiroz, Domingo; Cosmelli, Diego
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    The Energy Homeostasis Principle: Neuronal Energy Regulation Drives Local Network Dynamics Generating Behavior
    (Frontiers, 2019) Vergara, Rodrigo C.; Jaramillo-Riveri, Sebastián; Luarte, Alejandro; Moenne Vargas, Cristóbal Matías; Fuentes, Rómulo; Couve C., Andrés; Maldonado, Pedro E.
    A major goal of neuroscience is understanding how neurons arrange themselves into neural networks that result in behavior. Most theoretical and experimental efforts have focused on a top-down approach which seeks to identify neuronal correlates of behaviors. This has been accomplished by effectively mapping specific behaviors to distinct neural patterns, or by creating computational models that produce a desired behavioral outcome. Nonetheless, these approaches have only implicitly considered the fact that neural tissue, like any other physical system, is subjected to several restrictions and boundaries of operations. Here, we proposed a new, bottom-up conceptual paradigm: The Energy Homeostasis Principle, where the balance between energy income, expenditure, and availability are the key parameters in determining the dynamics of neuronal phenomena found from molecular to behavioral levels. Neurons display high energy consumption relative to other cells, with metabolic consumption of the brain representing 20% of the whole-body oxygen uptake, contrasting with this organ representing only 2% of the body weight. Also, neurons have specialized surrounding tissue providing the necessary energy which, in the case of the brain, is provided by astrocytes. Moreover, and unlike other cell types with high energy demands such as muscle cells, neurons have strict aerobic metabolism. These facts indicate that neurons are highly sensitive to energy limitations, with Gibb's free energy dictating the direction of all cellular metabolic processes. From this activity, the largest energy, by far, is expended by action potentials and post-synaptic potentials; therefore, plasticity can be reinterpreted in terms of their energy context. Consequently, neurons, through their synapses, impose energy demands over post-synaptic neurons in a close loop-manner, modulating the dynamics of local circuits. Subsequently, the energy dynamics end up impacting the homeostatic mechanisms of neuronal networks. Furthermore, local energy management also emerges as a neural population property, where most of the energy expenses are triggered by sensory or other modulatory inputs. Local energy management in neurons may be sufficient to explain the emergence of behavior, enabling the assessment of which properties arise in neural circuits and how. Essentially, the proposal of the Energy Homeostasis Principle is also readily testable for simple neuronal networks.
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    Voluntary self-initiation of the stimuli onset improves working memory and accelerates visual and attentional processing
    (Elsevier Ltd, 2022) Loyola-Navarro, R.; Moenne Vargas, Cristóbal Matías; Vergara, Rodrigo C.; Hyafil, Alexandre; Aboitiz, Francisco; Maldonado, Pedro E.
    The ability of an organism to voluntarily control the stimuli onset modulates perceptual and attentional functions. Since stimulus encoding is an essential component of working memory (WM), we conjectured that controlling the initiation of the perceptual process would positively modulate WM. To corroborate this proposition, we tested twenty-five healthy subjects in a modified-Sternberg WM task under three stimuli presentation conditions: an automatic presentation of the stimuli, a self-initiated presentation of the stimuli (through a button press), and a self-initiated presentation with random-delay stimuli onset. Concurrently, we recorded the subjects' electroencephalographic signals during WM encoding. We found that the self-initiated condition was associated with better WM accuracy, and earlier latencies of N1, P2 and P3 evoked potential components representing visual, attentional and mental review of the stimuli processes, respectively. Our work demonstrates that self-initiated stimuli enhance WM performance and accelerate early visual and attentional processes deployed during WM encoding. We also found that self-initiated stimuli correlate with an increased attentional state compared to the other two conditions, suggesting a role for temporal stimuli predictability. Our study remarks on the relevance of self-control of the stimuli onset in sensory, attentional and memory updating processing for WM.