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. 2019 Oct;56(10):e13424.
doi: 10.1111/psyp.13424. Epub 2019 Jun 27.

Interactions between cardiac activity and conscious somatosensory perception

Paweł Motyka  1   2 , Martin Grund  2 , Norman Forschack  2   3 , Esra Al  2   4 , Arno Villringer  2   4 , Michael Gaebler  2   4   5
Affiliations

Interactions between cardiac activity and conscious somatosensory perception

Paweł Motyka et al. Psychophysiology. 2019 Oct.

Abstract

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. Here, we investigated whether the phase of the cardiac cycle and the prestimulus 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.

Keywords: cardiac cycle; heart rate; interoception; perceptual awareness; somatosensory perception.

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