Publication:

Priming overconfidence in belief systems reveals negative return on postural control mechanisms

Background: Modulation of postural control strategies and heightened perceptual ratings of instability when exposed to postural threats, illustrates the association between anxiety and postural control.

Research question: Here we test whether modulating prior expectations can engender postural-related anxiety which, in turn, may impair postural control and dissociate the well-established relationship between sway and subjective instability.

Methods: We modulated expectations of the difficulty posed by an upcoming postural task via priming. In the visual priming condition, participants watched a video of an actor performing the task with either a stable or unstable performance, before themselves proceeding with the postural task. In the verbal priming paradigm, participants were given erroneous verbal information regarding the amplitude of the forthcoming platform movement, or no prior information.

Results: Following the visual priming, the normal relationship between trunk sway and subjective instability was preserved only in those individuals that viewed the stable but not the unstable actor. In the verbal priming experiment we observed an increase in subjective instability and anxiety during task performance in individuals who were erroneously primed that sled amplitude would increase, when in fact it did not.

Significance: Our findings show that people's subjective experiences of instability and anxiety during a balancing task are powerfully modulated by priming. The contextual provision of erroneous cognitive priors dissociates the normally 'hard wired' relationship between objective measures and subjective ratings of sway. Our findings have potential clinical significance for the development of enhanced cognitive retraining in patients with balance disorders, e.g. via modifying expectations.