RESUMO
It has been indicated that extreme sport activities result in a highly rewarding experience, despite also providing fear, stress and anxiety. Studies have related this experience to the concept of flow, a positive feeling that individuals undergo when they are completely immersed in an activity. However, little is known about the exact nature of these experiences, and, there are still no empirical results to characterize the brain dynamics during extreme sport practice. This work aimed at investigating changes in psychological responses while recording physiological (heart rate-HR, and breathing rate-BR) and neural (electroencephalographic-EEG) data of eight volunteers, during outdoors slackline walking in a mountainous environment at two different altitude conditions (1 m-low-walk- and 45 m-high-walk-from the ground). Low-walk showed a higher score on flow scale, while high-walk displayed a higher score in the negative affect aspects, which together point to some level of flow restriction during high-walk. The order of task performance was shown to be relevant for the physiological and neural variables. The brain behavior during flow, mainly considering attention networks, displayed the stimulus-driven ventral attention network-VAN, regionally prevailing (mainly at the frontal lobe), over the goal-directed dorsal attention network-DAN. Therefore, we suggest an interpretation of flow experiences as an opened attention to more changing details in the surroundings, i.e., configured as a 'task-constantly-opened-to-subtle-information experience', rather than a 'task-focused experience'.
Assuntos
Altitude , Atenção , Eletroencefalografia , Emoções , Frequência Cardíaca , Caminhada , Humanos , Masculino , Caminhada/fisiologia , Caminhada/psicologia , Adulto , Atenção/fisiologia , Frequência Cardíaca/fisiologia , Emoções/fisiologia , Feminino , Adulto Jovem , Taxa Respiratória/fisiologia , Encéfalo/fisiologia , Esportes/psicologia , Esportes/fisiologiaRESUMO
The present study attempts to better identify the neurophysiological changes occurring during flow experience and how this can be related to the mobilization of attentional resources. Self-reports of flow (using a flow feelings scale) and attention (using thought probes), autonomic activity (heart rate, heart rate variability, and breathing rate), and cerebral oxygenation (using near-infrared spectroscopy) in two regions of the frontoparietal attention network (right lateral frontal cortex and right inferior parietal lobe) were measured during the practice of two simple video games (Tetris and Pong) played at different difficulty conditions (easy, optimal, hard, or self-selected). Our results indicated that an optimal level of difficulty, compared with an easy or hard level of difficulty led to greater flow feelings and a higher concentration of oxygenated hemoglobin in the regions of the frontoparietal network. The self-selected, named autonomy condition did not lead to more flow feelings than the optimal condition; however, the autonomy condition led to greater sympathetic activity (reduced heart rate variability and greater breathing rate) and higher activation of the frontoparietal regions. Our study suggests that flow feelings are highly connected to the mobilization of attentional resources, and all the more in a condition that promotes individuals' choice and autonomy.