Does the body give the brain an attentional boost? Examining the relationship between attentional and cardiac gating.
Author: Li X1, Swallow K2, Chiu M3, De Rosa E3, Anderson AK3
Affiliation:
1Department of Human Development, Human Neuroscience Institute, Cornell University, Rm 162 Human Ecology Building, Ithaca, NY, 14850, USA. Electronic address: xl624@cornell.edu.
2Department of Psychology, Cornell University, 211 Uris Hall, Ithaca, NY, 14850, USA.
3Department of Human Development, Human Neuroscience Institute, Cornell University, Rm 162 Human Ecology Building, Ithaca, NY, 14850, USA.
Conference/Journal: Biol Psychol.
Date published: 2018 Oct 21
Other:
Pages: S0301-0511(18)30077-2 , Special Notes: doi: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2018.10.008. [Epub ahead of print] , Word Count: 165
Studies on mind-body interactions have largely focused on how mental states modulate bodily physiological responses. Increasing evidence suggests that bodily states also modulate mental states. Here we investigated how both may be integrated in the brain at the resolution of a heartbeat, examining how phasic fluctuations of peripheral blood pressure and central attentional resources combine to influence cognition. We examined the effects of cardiac phase on the performance of two simultaneous tasks: a go/no-go letter detection task where targets were concurrently presented on background faces and a short-term memory face discrimination task. Short-term memory for the background face was better when the initial face was encoded during the systole rather than diastole phase and when it was paired with a target rather than a distractor. There was no significant interaction between cardiac phase and letter detection. These data suggest that peripheral blood pressure and central attention independently regulate cognitive performance.
KEYWORDS: Attentional boost effect; Baroreceptor; ECG/EKG; Visual short-term memory
PMID: 30355518 DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2018.10.008
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