Active information sampling varies across the cardiac cycle

Abstract

Perception and cognition oscillate with fluctuating bodily states. For example, visual processing has been shown to change with alternating cardiac phases. Here, we study the heartbeat's role for active information sampling-testing whether humans implicitly act upon their environment so that relevant signals appear during preferred cardiac phases. During the encoding period of a visual memory experiment, participants clicked through a set of emotional pictures to memorize them for a later recognition test. By self-paced key press, they actively prompted the onset of short (100 ms) presented pictures. Simultaneously recorded electrocardiograms allowed us to analyze the self-initiated picture onsets relative to the heartbeat. We find that self-initiated picture onsets vary across the cardiac cycle, showing an increase during cardiac systole, while memory performance was not affected by the heartbeat. We conclude that active information sampling integrates heart-related signals, thereby extending previous findings on the association between body-brain interactions and behavior. K E Y W O R D Scardiovascular, emotion, interoception, memory, sensation/perception, young adults 2 of 16 | KUNZENDORF Et al. Cardiac activity occurs in a cycle of two phases: During diastole, the ventricles relax to be filled with blood; during systole, the ventricles contract and eject blood into the arteries, while visceral pathways send information about each heartbeat to the brain (Critchley & Harrison, 2013). Such natural phasic changes of the cardiovascular state have been mainly associated with variations in perception. For sensory processing, which is typically measured with detection tasks or reaction time tasks, response to passively presented stimuli has been shown to be attenuated during early cardiac phases (i.e., during systole) or relatively enhanced at later time points in the cardiac cycle (i.e., at diastole;

Active sampling in visual search is coupled to the cardiac cycle

“…To examine whether or not there was a significant statistical relationship between the saccades, fixations, blinks, and the phase of the cardiac cycle, we calculated the phase of these oculomotor events as a function of the R-R interval (Kunzendorf et al, 2019). Circular statistics were employed in order to exploit the iterating nature of the cardiac cycle.…”

“…Ohl and colleagues (2016) reported the generation of involuntary phase-locked microsaccades to the systolic phase of the cardiac cycle. Similarly, Kunzendorf et al, (2019) reported the generation of more keypresses, which led to the onset of images to-be-sampled, during the systolic phase. Here we tested the hypothesis that the timing of eye movements in a free visual search task would be modulated during the different phases of the cardiac cycle.…”

Impact of cardiac interoception cues and confidence on voluntary decisions to make or withhold action in an intentional inhibition task

“…In both our present and our previous stop signal studies, we targeted the presentation of motor task cues according to timepoints when arterial baroreceptors -which underpin the neural and cognitive perception of a heartbeat -will be maximally active versus quiescent. Alternatively, one can study each individual participant's ECG post-hoc to either pinpoint whether stimuli fell into particular cardiac phases 19 , or bin trials into histogram plots 21 . It may be important to bear in mind such different methodological approaches in timing task events to specific points within the cardiac cycle when comparing cardiac timing effects across studies.…”

Breathing affects self-other voice discrimination in a bodily state with increased otherness

“…Phase values belonging to the interval (-π, 0) were classified as expiration, whereas those in the interval (0, π) as inspiration. Systole and diastole of a heartbeat signal were defined as parts of a heartbeat cycle with previously defined onsets and durations relative to R peak (Kunzendorf et al, 2019).…”