Respiration aligns perception with neural excitability

Kluger, D. S., Balestrieri, E., Busch, N. A. and Gross, J. (2021) Respiration aligns perception with neural excitability. eLife, 10, e70907. (doi: 10.7554/elife.70907) (PMID:34904567) (PMCID:PMC8763394)

Abstract

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.

• Item Type: Articles
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Gross, Professor Joachim

Creator Roles

Gross, J.: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Writing – review and editing

• Authors: Kluger, D. S., Balestrieri, E., Busch, N. A., and Gross, J.
• College/School: College of Medical Veterinary and Life Sciences > School of Psychology & Neuroscience
• Journal Name: eLife
• Publisher: eLife Sciences Publications
• ISSN: 2050-084X
• ISSN (Online): 2050-084X
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2021 Kluger et al.
• First Published: First published in eLife 10: e70907
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons License