Respiration aligns perception with neural excitability

eLife

Joachim Gross¹  Elio Balestrieri²  Daniel S Kluger³  Niko A Busch⁴ 

[1] Institute of Psychology, University of Münster, Münster, Germany;Otto Creutzfeldt Center for Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience, University of Münster, Münster, Germany;Institute for Biomagnetism and Biosignal Analysis, University of Münster, Münster, Germany;Otto Creutzfeldt Center for Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience, University of Münster, Münster, Germany;

关键词: respiration;    body-brain coupling;    alpha oscillations;    interoception;    neural excitability;   

DOI  :  10.7554/eLife.70907

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

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 behavior. We acquired respiration and human magnetoencephalography 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 versus undetected targets underscored the behavioral benefits of heightened excitability. Notably, respiration-locked excitability changes were maximized 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.

【 授权许可】

Unknown