Touch facilitates newborns' self-regulation: Systematic review of multidimensional arousal outcomes.

During the first month of life, exchanges between newborns and caregivers focus on helping babies regulate their physiological and behavioural states. Touch and bodily contact play a special role in facilitating arousal regulation and are often used to promote bonding, support at-risk babies, and manage pain. Here, we systematically review the extant evidence on the effects of touch interventions for newborns, specifically focusing on self-regulation and arousal as outcome measures.

The space between us: The effect of perceived threat on discomfort distance and perceived pleasantness of interpersonal vicarious touch.

The space we keep between ourselves and others allows us either to engage in close shared experiences or to distance ourselves for safety. Focusing primarily on the latter, previous studies have identified a link between interpersonal boundaries and perceived threat, perceptual discrimination including pain perception as well as how we move and behave as a result. Although interpersonal distancing has been studied in a range of contexts, a mechanistic way of how such spatial behaviour might alter how we perceive affective touch has yet to be investigated.

Music influences performance without increasing perceived exertion during high-intensity rowing intervals: a cross-over design study.

Objectives: This study assessed how exposure to slow (SBM) versus fast beat music (FBM) during high-intensity rowing intervals affects performance, heart rate (HR), lactate levels, relative perceived exertion (RPE), and recovery.

Methods: The A/B crossover design involved 21 participants performing 5 × 500 m rowing intervals under two conditions: FBM and SBM. Primary endpoint was the difference in total rowing time.

Propensity to trust shapes perceptions of comforting touch between trustworthy human and robot partners.

Touching a friend to comfort or be comforted is a common prosocial behaviour, firmly based in mutual trust. Emphasising the interactive nature of trust and touch, we suggest that vulnerability, reciprocity and individual differences shape trust and perceptions of touch. We further investigate whether these elements also apply to companion robots.

You, me, and us: Maintaining self-other distinction enhances coordination, agency, and affect.

Coordinating our actions with others changes how we behave and feel. Here, we provide evidence that interacting with others rests on a balance between self-other integration and segregation. Using a group walking paradigm, participants were instructed to synchronize with a metronome while listening to the sounds of 8 virtual partners.

Reciprocity and alignment: quantifying coupling in dynamic interactions.

Recent accounts of social cognition focus on we do things together, suggesting that becoming aligned relies on a reciprocal exchange of information. The next step is to develop richer computational methods that quantify the degree of coupling and describe the nature of the information exchange. We put forward a definition of coupling, comparing it to related terminology and detail, available computational methods and the level of organization to which they pertain, presenting them as a hierarchy from weakest to richest forms of coupling.

Leadership and tempo perturbation affect coordination in medium-sized groups.

In marching bands, sports, dance and virtually all human group behaviour, we coordinate our actions with others. Coordinating actions in time and space can act as a social glue, facilitating bonding among people. However, much of our understanding about coordination dynamics is based on research into dyadic interactions.

Racial bias in face perception is sensitive to instructions but not introspection.

Faces with typically African features are perceived as darker than they really are. We investigated how early in processing the bias emerges, whether participants are aware of it, and whether it can be altered by explicit instructions. We presented pairs of faces sequentially, manipulated the luminance and morphological features of each, and asked participants which was lighter, and how confident they were in their responses.

Confidence is higher in touch than in vision in cases of perceptual ambiguity.

The inclination to touch objects that we can see is a surprising behaviour, given that vision often supplies relevant and sufficiently accurate sensory evidence. Here we suggest that this 'fact-checking' phenomenon could be explained if touch provides a higher level of perceptual certainty than vision. Testing this hypothesis, observers explored inverted T-shaped stimuli eliciting the Vertical-horizontal illusion in vision and touch, which included clear-cut and ambiguous cases.

Author Correction: Contingent sounds change the mental representation of one's finger length.

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has not been fixed in the paper.

Contingent sounds change the mental representation of one's finger length.

Mental body-representations are highly plastic and can be modified after brief exposure to unexpected sensory feedback. While the role of vision, touch and proprioception in shaping body-representations has been highlighted by many studies, the auditory influences on mental body-representations remain poorly understood. Changes in body-representations by the manipulation of natural sounds produced when one's body impacts on surfaces have recently been evidenced.

Voice over: Audio-visual congruency and content recall in the gallery setting.

Experimental research has shown that pairs of stimuli which are congruent and assumed to 'go together' are recalled more effectively than an item presented in isolation. Will this multisensory memory benefit occur when stimuli are richer and longer, in an ecological setting? In the present study, we focused on an everyday situation of audio-visual learning and manipulated the relationship between audio guide tracks and viewed portraits in the galleries of the Tate Britain. By varying the gender and narrative style of the voice-over, we examined how the perceived congruency and assumed unity of the audio guide track with painted portraits affected subsequent recall.

Testing the shared spatial representation of magnitude of auditory and visual intensity.

The largely automatic mapping observed between space and sensory magnitudes suggests representation by a single system across domains. Using stimulus response compatibility tasks, the study confirms that a relative, auditory magnitude such as loudness shows a spatial compatibility effect similar to those evidenced for visual sensory domains but only with comparison tasks and for vertically oriented responses. No effect is seen when participants track changes in amplitude or when responses are oriented vertically.

Fostering Social Cognition through an Imitation- and Synchronization-Based Dance/Movement Intervention in Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Controlled Proof-of-Concept Study.

Background: Since social cognition is impaired in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), this study aimed at establishing the efficacy of a newly developed imitation- and synchronization-based dance/movement intervention (SI-DMI) in fostering emotion inference and empathic feelings (emotional reaction to feelings of others) in adults with high-functioning ASD.

Methods: Fifty-five adults with ASD (IQ ≥85) who were blinded to the aim of the study were assigned to receive either 10 weeks of a dance/movement intervention focusing on interpersonal movement imitation and synchronization (SI-DMI, n = 27) or a control movement intervention (CMI, n = 24) focusing on individual motor coordination (2 participants from each group declined before baseline testing). The primary outcome measure was the objective Multifaceted Empathy Test targeting emotion inference and empathic feelings.

Sensorimotor synchronization with tempo-changing auditory sequences: Modeling temporal adaptation and anticipation.

The current study investigated the human ability to synchronize movements with event sequences containing continuous tempo changes. This capacity is evident, for example, in ensemble musicians who maintain precise interpersonal coordination while modulating the performance tempo for expressive purposes. Here we tested an ADaptation and Anticipation Model (ADAM) that was developed to account for such behavior by combining error correction processes (adaptation) with a predictive temporal extrapolation process (anticipation).

Physiological and behavioral responses reveal 9-month-old infants' sensitivity to pleasant touch.

Caregiving touch has been shown to be essential for the growth and development of human infants. However, the physiological and behavioral mechanisms that underpin infants' sensitivity to pleasant touch are still poorly understood. In human adults, a subclass of unmyelinated peripheral nerve fibers has been shown to respond preferentially to medium-velocity soft brushing.

Segregation and integration of auditory streams when listening to multi-part music.

In our daily lives, auditory stream segregation allows us to differentiate concurrent sound sources and to make sense of the scene we are experiencing. However, a combination of segregation and the concurrent integration of auditory streams is necessary in order to analyze the relationship between streams and thus perceive a coherent auditory scene. The present functional magnetic resonance imaging study investigates the relative role and neural underpinnings of these listening strategies in multi-part musical stimuli.

Leading the follower: an fMRI investigation of dynamic cooperativity and leader-follower strategies in synchronization with an adaptive virtual partner.

From everyday experience we know that it is generally easier to interact with someone who adapts to our behavior. Beyond this, achieving a common goal will very much depend on who adapts to whom and to what degree. Therefore, many joint action tasks such as musical performance prove to be more successful when defined leader-follower roles are established.

The importance of integration and top-down salience when listening to complex multi-part musical stimuli.

In listening to multi-part music, auditory streams can be attended to either selectively or globally. More specifically, musicians rely on prioritized integrative attention which incorporates both stream segregation and integration to assess the relationship between concurrent parts. In this fMRI study, we used a piano duet to investigate which factors of a leader-follower relationship between parts grab the listener's attention and influence the perception of multi-part music.

Synchronizing with auditory and visual rhythms: an fMRI assessment of modality differences and modality appropriateness.

Synchronizing movements with auditory beats, compared to visual flashes, yields divergent activation in timing-related brain areas as well as more stable tapping synchronization. The differences in timing-related brain activation could reflect differences in tapping synchronization stability, rather than differences between modality (i.e.

Being and feeling in sync with an adaptive virtual partner: brain mechanisms underlying dynamic cooperativity.

Cooperation is intrinsic to the human ability to work together toward common goals, and depends on sensing and reacting to dynamically changing relationships between coacting partners. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a paradigm in which an adaptive pacing signal simulates a virtual partner, we examined the neural substrates underlying dynamic joint action. A single parameter controlled the degree to which the virtual partner adapted its behavior in relation to participant taps, thus simulating varying degrees of cooperativity.