0000000000294012
AUTHOR
Guy Vardon
Ventilatory conditioning by self-stimulation in rats: A pilot study
International audience; This article describes an experimental attempt to condition breathing pattern in rats. In this experiment, a freely moving rat was first rewarded by an electrical stimulation of the medial forebrain bundle whenever inspiratory duration (TI) exceeded 300 ms. A bidirectional control was then used: TIs longer than 400 ms were rewarded, and then TIs shorter than 300 ms were rewarded. The frequency of TIs longer than 300 ms increased when this event was rewarded, further increased when TIs above 400 ms were rewarded, and decreased during reversal conditioning (TI < 300 ms). At the beginning of the experiment, stimulation caused increased arousal and motor activity, but af…
The effect of attentional load on the breathing pattern in children.
Abstract Experiments designed to establish the effects of video games on breathing patterns have led to contradictory results. Several authors reported that video games tended to increase breathing frequency (i.e. to reduce breath duration), whereas others reported the opposite. We postulated that video games contain different psychophysiological components which may have opposite effects on breathing pattern. On the one hand, arousal and emotion may tend to stimulate breathing. On the other, focusing attention on the game may prompt subject to inhibit any movement — including breathing — which might be a potential nuisance variable. The aim of this study was to assess the specific effects …
Effects of voluntary changes in breathing frequency on respiratory comfort
Previous experiments on voluntary breathing have suggested that spontaneous breathing is partly determined by the minimization of respiratory sensations. However, during instructed breathing, respiratory sensations may be confounded with difficulty in achieving the prescribed pattern. In the present experiment, we tested the hypothesis that the subjective assessment of respiratory comfort and the difficulty in following breathing instructions are closely related. A total of 15 subjects adjusted breathing frequency to prescribed values ranging from 40 to 250% of individual spontaneous levels. Then, they scored the difficulty of this task and the discomfort associated with the target frequenc…
Ventilatory responses to imagined exercise.
We studied whether the ventilatory responses to imagined exercise are influenced by automatic processes. Twenty-nine athletes produced mental images of a sport event with successive focus on the environment, the preparation, and the exercise. Mean breathing frequency increased from 15 to 22 breaths/min. Five participants reported having voluntarily controlled breathing, two of them during preparation. Twenty participants reported that their breathing pattern changed during the experiment: 11 participants were unable to correctly report on the direction of changes in frequency, and 13 incorrectly reported changes in amplitude. This finding suggests that these changes were not voluntary in mo…
Classic conditioning of the ventilatory responses in rats
Nsegbe, Elise, Guy Vardon, Pierre Perruchet, and Jorge Gallego. Classic conditioning of the ventilatory responses in rats. J. Appl. Physiol. 83(4): 1174–1183, 1997.—Recent authors have stressed the role of conditioning in the control of breathing, but experimental evidence of this role is still sparse and contradictory. To establish that classic conditioning of the ventilatory responses can occur in rats, we performed a controlled experiment in which a 1-min tone [conditioned stimulus (CS)] was paired with a hypercapnic stimulus [8.5% CO2, unconditioned stimulus (US)]. The experimental group ( n = 9) received five paired CS-US presentations, followed by one CS alone to test conditioning. Th…