Neuronal bases of structural coherence in contemporary dance observation

Trait representation of embodied cognition in dancers pivoting on the extended mirror neuron system: a resting-state fMRI study

Introduction

Dance is an art form that integrates the body and mind through movement. Dancers develop exceptional physical and mental abilities that involve various neurocognitive processes linked to embodied cognition. We propose that dancers' primary trait representation is movement-actuated and relies on the extended mirror neuron system (eMNS).

Methods

A total of 29 dancers and 28 non-dancer controls were recruited. A hierarchical approach of intra-regional and inter-regional functional connectivity (FC) analysis was adopted to probe trait-like neurodynamics within and between regions in the eMNS during rest. Correlation analyses were employed to examine the associations between dance training, creativity, and the FC within and between different brain regions.

Results

Within the eMNS, dancers exhibited increased intra-regional FC in various brain regions compared to non-dancers. These regions include the left inferior frontal gyrus, left ventral premotor cortex, left anterior insula, left posterior cerebellum (crus II), and bilateral basal ganglia (putamen and globus pallidus). Dancers also exhibited greater intrinsic inter-regional FC between the cerebellum and the core/limbic mirror areas within the eMNS. In dancers, there was a negative correlation observed between practice intensity and the intrinsic FC within the eMNS involving the cerebellum and basal ganglia. Additionally, FCs from the basal ganglia to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex were found to be negatively correlated with originality in dancers.

Discussion

Our results highlight the proficient communication within the cortical-subcortical hierarchy of the eMNS in dancers, linked to the automaticity and cognitive-motor interactions acquired through training. Altered functional couplings in the eMNS can be regarded as a unique neural signature specific to virtuoso dancers, which might predispose them for skilled dancing performance, perception, and creation.

Brain Activity of Professional Dancers During Audiovisual Stimuli Exposure: A Systematic Review

Many studies have shown the effect of dance to the brain. It seems that long-term practice modulates brain plasticity and visuomotor skills, as it activates the Action Observation Network (AON). The aim of this systematic review was to evaluate potential differences in the brain activity (visuomotor skills) between professional dancers and non-dancer adults, measured by electroencephalography (EEG), during the observation of an individual who is dancing (video dance stimuli). This literature search was conducted from February to June 2022, according to the PRISMA guidelines, in the PubMed database using advanced search, mesh terms, and extensive manual search. The included articles were published in English. Specifically, case-control studies were selected, which used healthy adults, professional dancers, and non-dancers as participants, who were exposed to video dance clips and measured by EEG. The articles were excluded if they were based on different type of study, unhealthy population, control group with athletic background, different type of stimuli (rhythmic), or different type of task and procedure. The ratings of quality of evidence were conducted using the Joanna Briggs Institute's (JBI) critical appraisal tool. Five case-control studies were included with 193 participants in total, 87% females. The participating groups of professional dancers (n = 12-25) had mean age 25.14 years, with at least 9-19 years of professional training, whereas control groups had the same sample size, mean age of 24.14 years, and no experience in dancing. Most of the studies presented high methodological quality. All studies showed significant differences in dancers' brain activity, especially regarding the visuomotor skills. The results showed faster activation of AON demonstrated by higher P300 at the frontocentral regions and increased sensitivity of the occipital temporal cortex. Dancers could cope easier with familiar-unfamiliar and effortful-effortless movements. They also demonstrated faster alpha band peak frequency, stronger synchrony over the bands theta, beta, gamma during the audiovisual stimuli, and the ability to encode faster the visual information. The results demonstrate that dancers had better visuomotor skills suggesting dance-enhanced neuroplasticity, as professional dancers processed their actions easier. Dance, which includes visuomotor tasks, could help in prevention, therapy, and rehabilitation of neurodegenerative diseases or movement disorders.

Sex-Specific Brain Responses to Imaginary Dance but Not Physical Dance: An Electroencephalography Study of Functional Connectivity and Electrical Brain Activity

To date, most neurophysiological dance research has been conducted exclusively with female participants in observational studies (i.e., participants observe or imagine a dance choreography). In this regard, the sex-specific acute neurophysiological effect of physically executed dance can be considered a widely unexplored field of research. This study examines the acute impact of a modern jazz dance choreography on brain activity and functional connectivity using electroencephalography (EEG). In a within-subject design, 11 female and 11 male participants were examined under four test conditions: physically dancing the choreography with and without music and imagining the choreography with and without music. Prior to the EEG measurements, the participants acquired the choreography over 3 weeks with one session per week. Subsequently, the participants conducted all four test conditions in a randomized order on a single day, with the EEG measurements taken before and after each condition. Differences between the male and female participants were established in brain activity and functional connectivity analyses under the condition of imagined dance without music. No statistical differences between sexes were found in the other three conditions (physically executed dance with and without music as well as imagined dance with music). Physically dancing and music seem to have sex-independent effects on the human brain. However, thinking of dance without music seems to be rather sex-specific. The results point to a promising approach to decipher sex-specific differences in the use of dance or music. This approach could further be used to achieve a more group-specific or even more individualized and situationally adapted use of dance interventions, e.g., in the context of sports, physical education, or therapy. The extent to which the identified differences are due to culturally specific attitudes in the sex-specific contact with dance and music needs to be clarified in future research.

Dance Improves Motor, Cognitive, and Social Skills in Children With Developmental Cerebellar Anomalies

In this multiple single-cases study, we used dance to train sensorimotor synchronization (SMS), motor, and cognitive functions in children with developmental cerebellar anomalies (DCA). DCA are rare dysfunctions of the cerebellum that affect motor and cognitive skills. The cerebellum plays an important role in temporal cognition, including SMS, which is critical for motor and cognitive development. Dancing engages the SMS neuronal circuitry, composed of the cerebellum, the basal ganglia, and the motor cortices. Thus, we hypothesized that dance has a beneficial effect on SMS skills and associated motor and cognitive functions in children with DCA. Seven children (aged 7-11) with DCA participated in a 2-month dance training protocol (3 h/week). A test-retest design protocol with multiple baselines was used to assess children's SMS skills as well as motor, cognitive, and social abilities. SMS skills were impaired in DCA before the training. The training led to improvements in SMS (reduced variability in paced tapping), balance, and executive functioning (cognitive flexibility), as well as in social skills (social cognition). The beneficial effects of the dance training were visible in all participants. Notably, gains were maintained 2 months after the intervention. These effects are likely to be sustained by enhanced activity in SMS brain networks due to the dance training protocol.

Visceromotor Roots of Aesthetic Evaluation of Pain in art: an fMRI Study

Empathy for pain involves sensory and visceromotor brain regions relevant also in the first-person pain experience. Focusing on brain activations associated with vicarious experiences of pain triggered by artistic or non-artistic images, the present study aims to investigate common and distinct brain activation patterns associated with these two vicarious experiences of pain and to assess whether empathy for pain brain regions contributes to the formation of an aesthetic judgement (AJ) in non-art expert observers. Artistic and non-artistic facial expressions (painful and neutral) were shown to participants inside the scanner and then aesthetically rated in a subsequent behavioural session. Results showed that empathy for pain brain regions (i.e. bilateral insular cortex, posterior sector of the anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior portion of the middle cingulate cortex) and bilateral inferior frontal gyrus are commonly activated by artistic and non-artistic painful facial expressions. For the artistic representation of pain, the activity recorded in these regions directly correlated with participants’ AJ. Results also showed the distinct activation of a large cluster located in the posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus for non-artistic stimuli. This study suggests that non-beauty-specific mechanisms such as empathy for pain are crucial components of the aesthetic experience of artworks.

A Practice-Inspired Mindset for Researching the Psychophysiological and Medical Health Effects of Recreational Dance (Dance Sport)

“Dance” has been associated with many psychophysiological and medical health effects. However, varying definitions of what constitute “dance” have led to a rather heterogenous body of evidence about such potential effects, leaving the picture piecemeal at best. It remains unclear what exact parameters may be driving positive effects. We believe that this heterogeneity of evidence is partly due to a lack of a clear definition of dance for such empirical purposes. A differentiation is needed between (a) the effects on the individual when the activity of “dancing” is enjoyed as a dancer within different dance domains (e.g., professional/”high-art” type of dance, erotic dance, religious dance, club dancing, Dance Movement Therapy (DMT), and what is commonly known as hobby, recreational or social dance), and (b) the effects on the individual within these different domains, as a dancer of the different dance styles (solo dance, partnering dance, group dance; and all the different styles within these). Another separate category of dance engagement is, not as a dancer, but as a spectator of all of the above. “Watching dance” as part of an audience has its own set of psychophysiological and neurocognitive effects on the individual, and depends on the context where dance is witnessed. With the help of dance professionals, we first outline some different dance domains and dance styles, and outline aspects that differentiate them, and that may, therefore, cause differential empirical findings when compared regardless (e.g., amount of interpersonal contact, physical exertion, context, cognitive demand, type of movements, complexity of technique and ratio of choreography/improvisation). Then, we outline commonalities between all dance styles. We identify six basic components that are part of any dance practice, as part of a continuum, and review and discuss available research for each of them concerning the possible health and wellbeing effects of each of these components, and how they may relate to the psychophysiological and health effects that are reported for “dancing”: (1) rhythm and music, (2) sociality, (3) technique and fitness, (4) connection and connectedness (self-intimation), (5) flow and mindfulness, (6) aesthetic emotions and imagination. Future research efforts might take into account the important differences between types of dance activities, as well as the six components, for a more targeted assessment of how “dancing” affects the human body.

Movies and narratives as naturalistic stimuli in neuroimaging

Using movies and narratives as naturalistic stimuli in human neuroimaging studies has yielded significant advances in understanding of cognitive and emotional functions. The relevant literature was reviewed, with emphasis on how the use of naturalistic stimuli has helped advance scientific understanding of human memory, attention, language, emotions, and social cognition in ways that would have been difficult otherwise. These advances include discovering a cortical hierarchy of temporal receptive windows, which supports processing of dynamic information that accumulates over several time scales, such as immediate reactions vs. slowly emerging patterns in social interactions. Naturalistic stimuli have also helped elucidate how the hippocampus supports segmentation and memorization of events in day-to-day life and have afforded insights into attentional brain mechanisms underlying our ability to adopt specific perspectives during natural viewing. Further, neuroimaging studies with naturalistic stimuli have revealed the role of the default-mode network in narrative-processing and in social cognition. Finally, by robustly eliciting genuine emotions, these stimuli have helped elucidate the brain basis of both basic and social emotions apparently manifested as highly overlapping yet distinguishable patterns of brain activity.

Introduction to the special issue on physics of mind

In recent years, both fields of physics and psychology have made important scientific advances. The emergence of new instruments gave rise to a data-driven neuroscience allowing us to learn about the state of the brain supporting known mental functions and conversely. In parallel, the appearance of new mathematics allowed the development of computational models describing fundamental brain functions and implementing them in technological applications. While emphasizing the methodology of physics, the special issue aims to bring together these trends in both the experimental and theoretical sciences in order to explain some of the most basic mental processes such as perception, cognition, emotion, consciousness, and learning. In this editorial, we define unsolved problems for brain and psychological sciences, discuss possible means toward their respective solutions, and outline some collaborative initiatives aiming toward these goals. The following problems are defined in gradual order of difficulty: what are the universal properties of human behavior across conditions and cultures? What have each culture learned over historical times and why should specific elements of knowledge be accumulated over cultural evolution? Can computational psychiatry help predict, understand, and cure mental disorders? What is the function of art and cultural artifacts such as music, fiction, or poetry for the cognitive system? How to explain the relation between first-person subjective experience and third-person objective physiological data? What neural mechanisms operate on which mental content at the highest levels of organization of the hierarchical brain? How do abstract ideas emerge from sensory-motor contingencies and what are the conditions for the birth of a new concept? Could symmetry play a role in psychogenesis and support the emergence of new hierarchical layers in cognition? How can we start addressing the question of meaning scientifically, and what does it entail for the physical sciences?

Steps Toward a Universal Grammar of Dance: Local Grouping Structure in Basic Human Movement Perception

The general goal of this paper is to investigate the structure of our unconscious mental representation of dance: we do not perceive dance as an unanalyzed flow of movement, but we unconsciously create a mental representation regulated by structural principles. Specifically, this article examines local grouping principles in dance perception inspired by Lerdahl and Jackendoff's (1983) approach to musical grouping. I spell out the basic perceptual dimensions at work in basic human movement perception, and on that basis, I propose six principles of change that determine group boundaries in dance (change of body part, orientation, level, direction, speed, quality). I experimentally test the relevance and interaction of these principles, and find that they are organized on a scale of relative strength. This experiment thus supports the hypothesis that grouping is a general cognitive capacity applying across domains and modalities, and shows how specific grouping principles are stated in relation to modality-specific and domain-specific dimensions. More generally, it takes a step toward the development of a generative theory of dance that should help extend the research avenue of comparing complex temporal cognitive activities across modalities (visual, auditory) and purposes (referential, non-referential), which so far involves spoken language, signed language and music.

Increased Insular Connectivity and Enhanced Empathic Ability Associated with Dance/Music Training

Dance and music are expressive art forms. Previous behavioural studies have reported that dancers/musicians show a better sensorimotor ability and emotional representation of others. However, the neural mechanism behind this phenomenon is not completely understood. Recently, intensive researches have identified that the insula is highly enrolled in the empathic process. Thus, to expand the knowledge of insular function associated with empathy under the dance/music training background, we mapped the insular network and its associated brain regions in 21 dancers, 20 musicians, and 24 healthy controls using resting-state functional connectivity (FC) analysis. Whole brain voxel-based analysis was performed using seeds from the posterior insula (PI), the ventral anterior insula (vAI), and the dorsal anterior insula (dAI). The training effects of dance and music on insular subnetworks were then evaluated using one-way analysis of variance ANOVA. Increased insular FC with those seeds was found in dancers/musicians, including PI and anterior cingulated cortex (ACC), vAI and middle temporal gyrus (MTG) and middle cingulated cortex (MCC), and dAI and ACC and MTG. In addition, significant associations were found between discrepant insular FC patterns and empathy scores in dancers and musicians. These results indicated that dance/music training might enhance insular subnetwork function, which would facilitate integration of intero/exteroceptive information and result in better affective sensitivity. Those changes might finally facilitate the subjects' empathic ability.

Ballroom Dancing Promotes Neural Activity in the Sensorimotor System: A Resting-State fMRI Study

Objective

This study aims at investigating differences in the spontaneous brain activity and functional connectivity in the sensorimotor system between ballroom dancers and nondancers, to further support the functional alteration in people with expertise.

Materials and Methods

Twenty-three ballroom dancers and twenty-one matched novices with no dance experience were recruited in this study. Amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (ALFF) and seed-based functional connectivity, as methods for assessing resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) data, were used to reveal the resting-state brain function in these participants.

Results

Compared to the novices, ballroom dancers showed increased ALFF in the left middle temporal gyrus, bilateral precentral gyrus, bilateral inferior frontal gyrus, left postcentral gyrus, left inferior temporal gyrus, right middle occipital gyrus, right superior temporal gyrus, and left middle frontal gyrus. The ballroom dancers also demonstrated lower ALFF in the left lingual gyrus and altered functional connectivity between the inferior frontal gyrus and temporal, parietal regions.

Conclusions

Our results indicated that ballroom dancers showed elevated neural activity in sensorimotor regions relative to novices and functional alterations in frontal-temporal and frontal-parietal connectivity, which may reflect specific training experience related to ballroom dancing, including high-capacity action perception, attentional control, and movement adjustment.

Brain correlates of constituent structure in sign language comprehension

During sentence processing, areas of the left superior temporal sulcus, inferior frontal gyrus and left basal ganglia exhibit a systematic increase in brain activity as a function of constituent size, suggesting their involvement in the computation of syntactic and semantic structures. Here, we asked whether these areas play a universal role in language and therefore contribute to the processing of non-spoken sign language. Congenitally deaf adults who acquired French sign language as a first language and written French as a second language were scanned while watching sequences of signs in which the size of syntactic constituents was manipulated. An effect of constituent size was found in the basal ganglia, including the head of the caudate and the putamen. A smaller effect was also detected in temporal and frontal regions previously shown to be sensitive to constituent size in written language in hearing French subjects (Pallier et al., 2011). When the deaf participants read sentences versus word lists, the same network of language areas was observed. While reading and sign language processing yielded identical effects of linguistic structure in the basal ganglia, the effect of structure was stronger in all cortical language areas for written language relative to sign language. Furthermore, cortical activity was partially modulated by age of acquisition and reading proficiency. Our results stress the important role of the basal ganglia, within the language network, in the representation of the constituent structure of language, regardless of the input modality.