The effect of dyspnea on recognition memory

Abstract

Dyspnea is a debilitating symptom in various prevalent diseases. Previous research demonstrated several cognitive impairments in dyspneic patients including an impairment in recognition memory. Even though some factors contributing to these impairments have already been identified (e.g., smoking, medication), the relevance of dyspnea as one of those contributing factors is still unclear. Thus, the goal of the current study was to investigate whether acute dyspnea impairs recognition memory in a picture recognition task as indexed by reduced accuracy and a reduced old-new effect in event-related potentials (ERPs) in the electroencephalogram (EEG). Fifty healthy participants underwent a passive encoding phase without dyspnea induction, followed by the picture recognition task performed during an unloaded baseline and a resistive load induced dyspnea condition while EEG was continuously measured. Results indicated comparable accuracy during the baseline and dyspnea condition. A reduced fronto-central old-new effect during dyspnea compared to baseline was found for ERPs in the latency ranges 350-500, 500-800, 800-1100, and 1110-1400 ms. These findings suggest that dyspnea influences the process of familiarity (350-500 ms) and recollection (500-800 ms) as well as post-retrieval processes (800-1100 and 1100-1400 ms), highlighting a potential impairing effect of acute dyspnea on recognition memory.

The load of dyspnoea on brain and legs

“…Nevertheless, the present findings by LAWI et al [32], together with those from previous studies [24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31], have several important implications. First, they highlight that dyspnoea per se changes important higher brain processes, above the level of the brainstem respiratory oscillator required for normal and usually unconscious breathing.…”

“…Moreover, inspiratory threshold loading decreased the performance in a face recognition task and a locomotor task as suggested by VINCKIER et al [25] and NIERAT et al [26]. Similarly, SUCEC et al [27,28] recently demonstrated that resistive load-induced dyspnoea impairs response inhibition and recognition memory [29]. Even the anticipation of upcoming dyspnoea was suggested to affect such cognitive processes [30,31].…”

“…Although not directly measured by LAWI et al [32], several previous studies using different neuroimaging techniques have already demonstrated that experimentally induced dyspnoea activates brain networks, which are also involved in cognitive, affective and motor processing [40][41][42]. These activations during acute dyspnoea, especially if involving brain areas that are needed for both processing of dyspnoea as well as cognitive and motor functions, limit available brain processing capacities for simultaneous cognitive and locomotor performance [26,29,30]. This dyspnoea-cognition/locomotor interference is in line with previous findings on dual-task interference showing that the simultaneous engagement in two tasks diminishes performance in both tasks, especially when depending on shared brain networks [43,44].…”

Impairment and characteristics of postural control sub-components in people with COPD: a scoping review

“…Previous research with elderly people has shown an age-related decrease of postural control performance under dual task conditions [114]. It is currently unclear if COPD disease provokes an additional impairment, but some specific factors associated with the pathology could be of interest regarding cognitive influences and postural control: for example, dyspnea has a known negative impact on cognitive parameters [115]. The presence of both acute and chronic dyspnea could induce modifications on cognitive function with some potential consequences on postural control.…”

The breathing brain: The potential of neural oscillations for the understanding of respiratory perception in health and disease

“…For example, future studies could assess the dynamics underlying memory encoding during dyspnea conditions, and relate the power/coupling changes to the subsequent recognition or recall performance. Such studies have already been conducted in combination with ERPs, and reported decreased performance on the Stroop task with reduced late potentials, as well as reduced fronto‐central potential differentiation during a recognition task (Sucec et al., 2018, 2020). Therefore, future studies with oscillatory dynamics could supplement these findings.…”