
Natalie RicherUniversity of Winnipeg · Department of Kinesiology and Applied Health
Natalie Richer
PhD Human Kinetics
About
32
Publications
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Introduction
I use mobile, high-density electroencephalography (EEG) to investigate how the brain is involved in standing and walking. My objective is to find out how brain activity changes with healthy aging and find ways to improve balance and reduce the risk of falls in older adults.
Publications
Publications (32)
Background : Beam walking is a highly studied assessment of walking balance. Recent research has demonstrated that brief intermittent visual rotations and occlusions can increase the efficacy of beam walking practice on subsequent beam walking without visual perturbations. We sought to examine the influence of full vision removal during practice wa...
Mobile brain imaging with high-density electroencephalography (EEG) can provide insight into the cortical processes involved in complex human walking tasks. While uneven terrain is common in the natural environment and poses challenges to human balance control, there is limited understanding of the supraspinal processes involved with traversing une...
Mobile brain imaging with high-density electroencephalography (EEG) can provide insight into the cortical processes involved in complex human walking tasks. While uneven terrain is common in the natural environment and poses challenges to human balance control, there is limited understanding of the supraspinal processes involved with traversing une...
Accuracy of electroencephalography (EEG) source localization relies on the volume conduction head model. A previous analysis of young adults has shown that simplified head models have larger source localization errors when compared with head models based on magnetic resonance images (MRIs). As obtaining individual MRIs may not always be feasible, r...
p>Accuracy of electroencephalography (EEG) source localization relies on the volume conduction head model. A previous analysis of young adults has shown that simplified head models have larger source localization errors when compared with head models based on magnetic resonance images (MRIs). As obtaining individual MRIs may not always be feasible,...
p>Accuracy of electroencephalography (EEG) source localization relies on the volume conduction head model. A previous analysis of young adults has shown that simplified head models have larger source localization errors when compared with head models based on magnetic resonance images (MRIs). As obtaining individual MRIs may not always be feasible,...
We developed a method for altering terrain unevenness on a treadmill to study gait kinematics. Terrain consisted of rigid polyurethane disks (12.7 cm diameter, 1.3–3.8 cm tall) which attached to the treadmill belt using hook-and-loop fasteners. Here, we tested four terrain unevenness conditions: Flat, Low, Medium, and High. The main objective was t...
We developed a method for altering terrain unevenness on a treadmill to study gait kinematics. We attached rigid polyurethane disks (12.7 cm diameter, 1.3-3.8 cm tall) to the treadmill belt using hook-and-loop fasteners. We tested four terrain conditions: Flat, Low, Medium, and High. The main objective was to test the hypothesis that increasing the...
Effects of uneven terrain on the stride time and variability of older adults.
Motion and muscle artifacts can undermine signal quality in electroencephalography (EEG) recordings during locomotion. We evaluated approaches for recovering ground-truth artificial brain signals from noisy EEG recordings. We built an electrical head phantom that broadcast four brain and four muscle sources. Head movements were generated by a robot...
Despite its popularity, there is a lack of standardization when assessing postural control. This study aimed to
suggest how many trials should be used when assessing young
adults’ postural control with a specific single-task and dual-task
quiet stance protocol. Two groups of 15 participants performed
20 trials of 60 s (feet together, eyes open) wit...
Carrying an anterior load during obstacle negotiation increases attention demand, which may differ at various crossing stages. Less is known on the impact of lower visual field obstruction and the weight of the anterior load on obstacle negotiation and attention demand. The objectives of this study were to: (1) determine if carrying a weighted ante...
Introduction
Le contrôle postural en station debout est généralement évalué par l’observation du déplacement du centre de pression. Il existe cependant un manque de standardisation quant au nombre d’essais à effectuer. Ce présent projet vise à proposer un nombre d’essais à effectuer lors de l’évaluation du contrôle postural en condition de simple e...
Background: Postural control improvements in external focus and cognitive task conditions are thought to occur because directing attention away from postural control allows greater automaticity. We aimed to support this theory by using three dynamic measures of postural control that may reveal changes in the structure or composition of sway: the di...
Background
The interstimulus interval of a cognitive task was found to have a limited effect on postural control in young adults, while visual cognitive tasks were found to improve stability compared to auditory tasks. It is of interest to investigate whether postural control in healthy older adults is sensitive to these types of cognitive task man...
Research suggests that an external focus or cognitive task may improve postural control. Removing attention from movement production may promote automaticity, or the tasks may promote ankle stiffening. To investigate these two theories, twenty older adults stood while performing baseline standing, internal focus, external focus, and two cognitive t...
The objective was to evaluate the impact of bilateral and unilateral fatigue of the plantarflexor muscles on blind navigation. Thirty-eight young adults walked 8-m without vision before fatigue (pre-fatigue), then fatigued either one or both of their plantarflexor muscles by performing isometric contractions. After each fatigue, two blind navigatio...
Attentional requirements of walking at various speeds in older adults were examined. Twenty healthy older adults (69.9 ± 2.77 years; 8 males) were asked to walk a distance of 10 m at a self-selected speed as well as 30% quicker and 30% slower. Concurrently, reaction time (RT) was evaluated by having participants respond as fast as possible to rando...
Researchers looking at the effects of performing a concurrent cognitive task on postural control in young and older adults using traditional center-of-pressure measures and complexity measures found discordant results. Results of experiments showing improvements of stability have suggested the use of strategies such as automatization of postural co...
Directing attention away from postural control and onto a cognitive task affords the emergence of automatic control processes. Perhaps the continuous withdrawal of attention from the postural task facilitates an automatization of posture as opposed to only intermittent withdrawal; however this is unknown in the aging population. Twenty older adults...
Research reveals improvements in postural control when focus is placed on movement effects rather than movement production, and further improvements during the performance of a concurrent cognitive task. It has yet to be determined if these changes are due to the use of an ankle stiffening strategy or to the use of more automatic postural control p...
Background/Study Context: Recent evidence suggests that removing attention from postural control using either an external focus or a cognitive task will improve stability in healthy young adults. Due to increases in attentional requirements of upright stance in older adults, it is unclear if similar benefits would be observed in this population. Th...
Research suggests that postural control synergies are sensitive to cognitive manipulations; however, the impact of different types of cognitive tasks on postural control remains inconclusive. The authors examined the effect of discrete and continuous tasks on postural control. Sixteen healthy young adults (M age = 22.7 ± 2.2 years) stood with feet...
Limited research has examined attentional requirements of walking at various speeds. Twenty young adults were asked to walk 10 m at their preferred pace, 30% faster or 30% slower while verbally responding "top" as fast as possible to random auditory stimuli. Slow walking demonstrated significantly longer reaction time (RT; 457 ± 91 ms) than preferr...
Carrying an anterior load while navigating an obstacle has been shown to increase attention demand, and this is thought to occur due to the added load as well as the occlusion of immediate anterior vision brought on by the load. Vision is an important factor when navigating an obstacle to aid in preventing any missteps while clearing the obstacle....
Navigation without vision is a skill that is often employed in our daily lives, such as walking in the dark at night. Navigating without vision to a remembered target has previously been studied. However, little is known about the impact of age or obstacles on the attentional demands of a blind navigation task. This study examined the impacts of ag...