Active tactile discrimination is coupled with and modulated by the cardiac cycle
- University of the Balearic Islands, Spain
- University College London, United Kingdom
Abstract
Perception and cognition are modulated by the phase of the cardiac signal in which the stimuli are presented. This has been shown by locking the presentation of stimuli to distinct cardiac phases. However, in everyday life sensory information is not presented in this passive and phase-locked manner, instead we actively move and control our sensors to perceive the world. Whether active sensing is coupled and modulated with the cardiac cycle remains largely unknown. Here we recorded the electrocardiograms of human participants while they actively performed a tactile grating orientation task. We show that the duration of subjects' touch varied as a function of the cardiac phase in which they initiated it. Touches initiated in the systole phase were held for longer periods of time than touches initiated in the diastole phase. This effect was most pronounced when elongating the duration of the touches to sense the most difficult gratings. Conversely, while touches in the control condition were coupled to the cardiac cycle, their length did not vary as a function of the phase in which these were initiated. Our results reveal that we actively spend more time sensing during systole periods, the cardiac phase associated with lower perceptual sensitivity (vs. diastole). In line with interoceptive inference accounts, these results indicate that we actively adjust the acquisition of sense data to our internal bodily cycles.
Data availability
All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting file; Source Data files have been provided for all figures in OSF repository: https://osf.io/d7x3g/
Article and author information
Author details
Alejandro Galvez-Pol
Funding
Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2016-120)
- James Kilner
Autonomus Community of the Balearic Islands, Postdoctoral Grant Margalida Comas (PD/036/2019)
- Alejandro Galvez-Pol
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- J Andrew Pruszynski, Western University, Canada
Ethics
Human subjects: All participants volunteered to take part in the experiment, gave informed consent, and were reimbursed for the participation. Ethical approval for the study was obtained from the University College London research ethics committee ID 10857/002
Version history
- Preprint posted: February 10, 2022 (view preprint)
- Received: February 23, 2022
- Accepted: October 11, 2022
- Accepted Manuscript published: October 12, 2022 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: November 17, 2022 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2022, Galvez-Pol et al.
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.
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Active tactile discrimination is coupled with and modulated by the cardiac cycle
eLife 11:e78126.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.78126
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