0000000000525318
AUTHOR
Sonja Denot-ledunois
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…