Posture biofeedback increases cognitive load

Abstract

Attention may be important for actively maintaining posture during computer tasks, resulting in a dual-task tradeoff, where maintaining posture through extrinsic feedback imposes cognitive load. Mindfulness may make intrinsic postural feedback (which imposes less cognitive load) more available. Therefore, we hypothesized that the use of biofeedback would improve posture and negatively impact game performance; additionally, higher levels of mindfulness would be associated with lower game performance costs in the biofeedback condition. Healthy young adult participants played a challenging computer game for 10 min with and without neck length biofeedback, in a counterbalanced repeated-measures design. For each condition, we assessed posture using neck shrinkage (percentage of best), and task performance (computer game score). Neck length was better retained and game performance was worse with biofeedback than without, consistent with the hypothesis that posture biofeedback imposed a cognitive load. In addition, participants with the most neck shrinkage suffered the greatest performance decrements from using biofeedback, and neck length retention during the task without biofeedback was associated with lower self-reported daily neck pain and higher self-reported mindfulness. Thus, those with the greatest need for postural feedback suffer the greatest performance decrements from extrinsic feedback. The results are consistent with the idea that mindfulness enables people to use intrinsic feedback to maintain posture without imposing a dual-task cost.