NCT04911439

Influence of Arousal on Motor Learning, Memory and Motor Imagery Ability in Young Population

Completed NA Last updated 22 March 2022

What this trial tests

NA trial testing Low Arousal in Arousal in 90 participants. Completed in 18 March 2022.

Timeline

14 June 2021

Primary endpoint
18 March 2022

18 March 2022

Quick facts

Lead sponsor	Susana Nunez Nagy
Phase	NA
Status	Completed
Study type	INTERVENTIONAL
Allocation	randomized
Design	parallel
Masking	double
Primary purpose	basic science
Enrollment	90
Start date	14 June 2021
Primary completion	18 March 2022
Estimated completion	18 March 2022
Sites	4 locations across France, Spain

Drugs / interventions tested

• Low Arousal
• Medium arousal
• High arousal

Conditions studied

• Arousal — all drugs for Arousal →

Sponsor

Susana Nunez Nagy

Who can join

Adults 18 to 35, any sex, with Arousal. Patients with the condition only — healthy volunteers not accepted.

Sponsor's own description

In motor learning is essential to consider that movements are produced by the cooperation and combination of many brain structures and are influenced by the emotions to which individuals are subjected. Several neural circuits have been identified that closely link the emotional system and the motion control system.

Arousal is associated with many emotional responses and has effects on the nervous and motor system. In line with the "Inverted 'U' Hypothesis", all levels of both high and low arousal do not allow optimal task performance, yet moderate levels lead to excellent performance. Arousal also plays a vital role in movement learning, where a critical element is memory. There is evidence that a minimum level of arousal is required to encode or record information and that that moderate levels of arousal improve memory.

Understanding how movement, emotions and interactions are regulated is significant because of the large number of movements humans perform. Of these, manual tasks represent precise movements that require the integration of many elements by the nervous system to perform these tasks successfully. How different levels of arousal influence the way manual tasks are learned is still unknown.

On the other hand, motor imagery (MI) is a cognitive process that is an important contributor to how movements are planned and executed. The use of MI has been recommended to improve movement learning and task execution. For an effective and individualize MI program is imperative to know this capacity. However, how different levels of arousal can affect our motor imagery ability is also still unknown.

The main objective of this study is to determine and quantify the effects of arousal levels in the learning of a precise manual task not previously trained on four parameters of fine motor control: time, error, speed, and accuracy. On the other hand, the aim is to determine if the ability of internal visual, external visual, and kinaesthetic imagery varies when participants are subjected to different levels of arousal.

Researches expect that non-anxious, non-stressed participants who are shown images that elicit an optimal level of arousal will show better motor performance on the fine motor task and better motor imagery ability. In contrast, researches expect that participants without anxiety and stress who are shown pictures that elicit a sub-optimal level of arousal will show poorer motor performance on the fine motor task and poorer motor imagery ability.

Publications & conference data

No peer-reviewed publications indexed yet for this trial. Completed trials usually publish results within 12-18 months.