The heartbeat evoked potential does not support strong interoceptive sensibility in trait mindfulness.

The enhancement of body awareness is proposed as one of the cognitive mechanisms that characterize mindfulness. To date, this hypothesis is supported by self-report and behavioral measures but still lacks physiological evidence. The current study investigated relation between trait mindfulness (i.e., individual differences in the ability to be mindful in daily life) and body awareness in combining a self-report measure (Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness [MAIA] questionnaire) with analysis of the heartbeat evoked potential (HEP), which is an event-related potential reflecting the cortical processing of the heartbeat. The HEP data were collected from 17 healthy participants under five minutes of resting-state condition. In addition, each participant completed the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory and the MAIA questionnaire. Taking account of the important variability of HEP effects, analyses were replicated with the same participants three times (in three distinct sessions). First, group-level analyses showed that HEP amplitude and trait mindfulness do not correlate. Secondly, we observed that HEP amplitude could positively correlate with self-reported body awareness; however, this association was unreliable over time. Interestingly, we found that HEP measure shows very poor reliability over time at the individual level, potentially explaining the lack of reliable association between HEP and psychological traits. Lastly, a reliable positive correlation was found between self-reported trait mindfulness and body awareness. Taken together, these findings provide preliminary evidence that the HEP might not support the increased subjective body awareness in trait mindfulness, thus suggesting that perhaps objective and subjective measures of body awareness could be independent. This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article: Verdonk, C., Trousselard, M., Di Bernardi Luft, C., Medani, T., Billaud, J.-B., Ramdani, C., Canini, F., Claverie, D., Jaumard-Hakoun, A., & Vialatte, F. (2021). The heartbeat evoked potential does not support strong interoceptive sensibility in trait mindfulness. Psychophysiology, 00, 1– 13. https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.13891, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.13891. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions

3D tongue motion visualization based on ultrasound image sequences

Abstract The article proposes a real-time technique for visualizing tongue motion driven by ultrasound image sequences. Local feature description is used to follow characteristic speckle patterns in a set of mid-sagittal contour points in an ultrasound image sequence, which are then used as markers for describing movements of the tongue. A 3D tongue model is subsequently driven by the motion data extracted from the ultrasound image sequences. The "modal warping" technique is used for real-time tongue deformation visualization. The resulting system will be useful in a variety of domains including speech production study, articulation training, educational scenarios, etc. Some parts of the interface are still being developed; we will show preliminary results in the demonstration