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Heartbeat and Somatosensory Perception

View ORCID ProfileEsra Al, Fivos Iliopoulos, Vadim V. Nikulin, Arno Villringer
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.12.29.424693
Esra Al
aDepartment of Neurology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, 04103 Leipzig, Germany
bMindBrainBody Institute, Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 10099 Berlin, Germany
cCenter for Stroke Research Berlin (CSB), Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, 10117 Berlin, Germany
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  • For correspondence: esraal@cbs.mpg.de
Fivos Iliopoulos
aDepartment of Neurology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, 04103 Leipzig, Germany
cCenter for Stroke Research Berlin (CSB), Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, 10117 Berlin, Germany
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Vadim V. Nikulin
aDepartment of Neurology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, 04103 Leipzig, Germany
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Arno Villringer
aDepartment of Neurology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, 04103 Leipzig, Germany
bMindBrainBody Institute, Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 10099 Berlin, Germany
cCenter for Stroke Research Berlin (CSB), Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, 10117 Berlin, Germany
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Abstract

Our perception of the external world is influenced by internal bodily signals. For example, we recently showed that timing of stimulation along the cardiac cycle and spontaneous fluctuations of heartbeat-evoked potential (HEP) amplitudes influence somatosensory perception and the associated neural processing (Al et al., 2020). While cardiac phase affected detection sensitivity and late components of the somatosensory-evoked potentials (SEPs), HEP amplitudes affected detection criterion and both early and late SEP components. In a new EEG study, we investigate whether these results are replicable in a modified paradigm, which includes two succeeding temporal intervals. Only in one of these intervals, subjects received a weak electrical finger stimulation and then performed a yes/no and two-interval forced-choice detection task. Our results confirm the previously reported cardiac cycle and prestimulus HEP effects on somatosensory perception and evoked potentials. In addition, we obtain two new findings: A source analysis in these two studies shows that the increased likelihood of conscious perception goes along with HEP fluctuations in parietal and posterior cingulate regions, known to play important roles in interoceptive processes. Furthermore, HEP amplitudes are shown to decrease when subjects engage in the somatosensory task compared to their resting state condition. Our findings are consistent with the view that HEP amplitudes are a marker of interoceptive (versus exteroceptive) attention and provide a neural underpinning for this view.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted December 30, 2020.
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Heartbeat and Somatosensory Perception
Esra Al, Fivos Iliopoulos, Vadim V. Nikulin, Arno Villringer
bioRxiv 2020.12.29.424693; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.12.29.424693
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Heartbeat and Somatosensory Perception
Esra Al, Fivos Iliopoulos, Vadim V. Nikulin, Arno Villringer
bioRxiv 2020.12.29.424693; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.12.29.424693

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