RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Interactions between cardiac activity and conscious somatosensory perception
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 529636
DO 10.1101/529636
A1 Paweł Motyka
A1 Martin Grund
A1 Norman Forschack
A1 Esra Al
A1 Arno Villringer
A1 Michael Gaebler
YR 2019
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/01/29/529636.abstract
AB Fluctuations in the heart’s activity can modulate the access of external stimuli to consciousness. The link between perceptual awareness and cardiac signals has been investigated mainly in the visual and auditory domain. We here investigated whether the phase of the cardiac cycle and the pre-stimulus heart rate influence conscious somatosensory perception. We also tested how conscious detection of somatosensory stimuli affects the heart rate. Electrocardiograms (ECG) of 33 healthy volunteers were recorded while applying near-threshold electrical pulses at a fixed intensity to the left index finger. Conscious detection was not uniformly distributed across the cardiac cycle but significantly higher in diastole than in systole. We found no evidence that the heart rate before a stimulus influenced its detection but hits (correctly detected somatosensory stimuli) led to a more pronounced cardiac deceleration than misses. Our findings demonstrate interactions between cardiac activity and conscious somatosensory perception, which highlights the importance of internal bodily states for sensory processing beyond the auditory and visual domain.Impact Statement It is highly debated to what extent cardiac activity modulates the access of external stimuli to consciousness. The evidence is inconsistent across sensory modalities and previous research focused at specific intervals within the cardiac cycle. Here, we examined the perception of near-threshold electrical pulses across the entire cardiac cycle. Our results show that conscious somatosensory perception is enhanced during the late phase of the cardiac cycle (at diastole) and associated with a more pronounced cardiac deceleration (as compared to non-detected stimuli). This strengthens the evidence that the physiological state of the body influences how we perceive the world.