Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland.
Department of Neurology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.
Psychophysiology. 2019 Oct;56(10):e13424. doi: 10.1111/psyp.13424. Epub 2019 Jun 27.
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.
心脏活动的波动可以调节外部刺激进入意识的方式。感知觉意识与心脏信号之间的联系主要在视觉和听觉领域进行了研究。在这里，我们研究了心脏周期的相位和刺激前的心率是否会影响有意识的体感感知。我们还测试了体感刺激的有意识检测如何影响心率。当用固定强度的电流脉冲刺激左食指指尖时，记录了 33 名健康志愿者的心电图（ECG）。有意识的检测并不是在整个心动周期中均匀分布的，而是在舒张期明显高于收缩期。我们没有发现刺激前的心率会影响其检测的证据，但命中（正确检测到的体感刺激）会导致比失误更明显的心率减速。我们的发现表明心脏活动和有意识的体感感知之间存在相互作用，这突出了内部身体状态对听觉和视觉领域之外的感觉处理的重要性。
