NEC Seminar
Speaker: Eileen Petros
Advisor: Hamid Charkhkar
Title: Investigating the Effects of a Sensory Neuroprosthesis on the Attentional Cost of Gait
Abstract: Gait is often thought of as requiring little mental effort, but attention is an essential part of gait control especially when walking is challenged such as with uneven terrain. Moreover, individuals with lower limb loss experience consistent higher attentional costs when walking. As a result, these individuals face an increased fear of falling, higher fall risk, and lower balance confidence all leading to a reduced quality of life. Attentional processing has two forms, endogenous or task-driven and exogenous or stimulus-driven. Absence of direct sensory feedback could interact with one or both mechanisms to increase attentional demand for individuals with lower limb loss. To address this challenge, our team has developed a sensory neuroprosthesis (SNP) that utilizes high density nerve cuff electrodes to elicit plantar sensation in participants’ missing limbs. To explore how this system affects endogenous attention during gait, I implemented a dual-task experiment which consists of walking on a self-paced treadmill while performing a variant of the Stroop task. The results of this experiment suggest the SNP facilitates more automatic gait control to relieve some attentional resources. Finally, I will discuss how the SNP may interact with exogenous attention by contributing to multisensory integration. Future work with the SNP will focus on examining how it modulates attentional load in this multisensory context, and I will present proposed experiments utilizing tactile cueing to investigate this dynamic.