Respiration aligns perception with neural excitability

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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 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.

Data availability

The anonymised data supporting the findings of this study are openly available from on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/ajuzh/).

Article and author information

Author details

Daniel S Kluger

University of Münster, Münster, Germany

For correspondence
daniel.kluger@uni-muenster.de

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-0691-794X
Elio Balestrieri

University of Münster, Münster, Germany

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Niko A Busch

University of Münster, Münster, Germany

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-4837-0345
Joachim Gross

University of Münster, Münster, Germany

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

Funding

Interdisciplinary Center for Clinical Research, University of Münster (Gro3/001/19)

Joachim Gross

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (GR2024/5-1)

Joachim Gross

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (BU2400/9-1)

Niko A Busch

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Human subjects: All participants gave written informed consent prior to all experimental procedures. The study was approved by the local ethics committee of the University of Muenster (approval ID 2018-068-f-S) and complied with the Declaration of Helsinki.

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.