Sigh rate and respiratory variability during mental load and sustained attention

Abstract

Spontaneous breathing consists of substantial correlated variability: Parameters characterizing a breath are correlated with parameters characterizing previous and future breaths. On the basis of dynamic system theory, negative emotion states are predicted to reduce correlated variability whereas sustained attention is expected to reduce total respiratory variability. Both are predicted to evoke sighing. To test this, respiratory variability and sighing were assessed during a baseline, stressful mental arithmetic task, nonstressful sustained attention task, and recovery in between tasks. For respiration rate (excluding sighs), reduced total variability was found during the attention task, whereas correlated variation was reduced during mental load. Sigh rate increased during mental load and during recovery from the attention task. It is concluded that mental load and task-related attention show specific patterns in respiratory variability and sigh rate.

Instantaneous changes in heart rate regulation due to mental load in simulated office work

“…An increased respiration frequency during a 1-h low-grade mental stress task in healthy subjects was already found in Nilsen et al (2007). Vlemincx et al (2011) also reported an increased breathing rate during mental stress, although Bernardi et al (2000) in contrast observed a slowing down of respiration frequency. The results also reveal an additional effect of the mental load to the physical load as the respiration frequency was higher during MPT1 compared to PT.…”

Stress classification by separation of respiratory modulations in heart rate variability using orthogonal subspace projection

“…The use of subject-independent classifiers might also explain why inclusion of respiratory information does not lead to an improvement of the performance of the classifier. It has been demonstrated that stress influences the respiratory pattern, but these conclusions are deduced from within-subject comparisons [6], [14]. On a subject-independent level, this information seems to be insignificant.…”

“…The data used in this research were measured at the Department of Psychology of the KU Leuven (Leuven, Belgium) in the context of a broader study [6], [7]. The electrocardiogram (ECG, sampling frequency f s = 200 Hz) and respiration (f s = 50 Hz) of 43 healthy students (age: 18-22 years) were recorded using the LifeShirt System (Vivometrics Inc., Ventura, CA).…”

Spurious correlations in simultaneous EEG-fMRI driven by in-scanner movement

“…Several studies have shown that physiological noise related to respiration and heart-rate variability correlates with cognitive tasks (Birn et al, 1999;Birn et al, 2009;Ent et al, 2014;Park et al, 2014;Vlemincx et al, 2011) and elicits prolonged negative correlations with BOLD signals -especially in midline areas (Birn et al, 2009;de Munck et al, 2008;Ent et al, 2014;Shmueli et al, 2007). Furthermore, task related changes in physiology can produce BOLD signal changes in vascular networks mimicking neuronal network activations (Bright et al, 2015).…”