RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Respiration aligns perception with neural excitability
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2021.03.25.436938
DO 10.1101/2021.03.25.436938
A1 Daniel S. Kluger
A1 Elio Balestrieri
A1 Niko A. Busch
A1 Joachim Gross
YR 2021
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/03/25/2021.03.25.436938.abstract
AB Recent studies from the field of interoception have highlighted the link between bodily and neural rhythms during action, perception, and cognition. The mechanisms underlying functional body-brain coupling, however, are poorly understood, as are the ways in which they modulate behaviour. We acquired respiration and human magnetoencephalography (MEG) data from a near-threshold spatial detection task to investigate the trivariate relationship between respiration, neural excitability, and performance. Respiration was found to significantly modulate perceptual sensitivity as well as posterior alpha power (8 – 13 Hz), a well-established proxy of cortical excitability. In turn, alpha suppression prior to detected vs undetected targets underscored the behavioural benefits of heightened excitability. Notably, respiration-locked excitability changes were maximised at a respiration phase lag of around - 30° and thus temporally preceded performance changes. In line with interoceptive inference accounts, these results suggest that respiration actively aligns sampling of sensory information with transient cycles of heightened excitability to facilitate performance.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.