The influence of the respiratory cycle on reaction times in sensory-cognitive paradigms

Abstract

Behavioural and electrophysiological studies point to widespread influence of the state of respiration on brain activity and cognitive performance. Still, the prevalence and relevance of such respiratory-behavioural relations in typical sensory-cognitive tasks remain unclear. We here used a battery of six tasks probing sensory detection, discrimination and short-term memory to address the questions of whether and by how much behaviour covaries with the respiratory cycle. Our results show that participants tended to align their respiratory cycle to the experimental paradigm. Furthermore, their reaction times, but not so much their response accuracy, consistently and significantly covaried with the respiratory cycle, and this effect was strongest when analyzed contingent on the respiratory state at participants' responses. The respective effect sizes where comparable to those seen in many typical neurocognitive experimental manipulations. These results support a prominent relation between respiration and sensory-cognitive function and suggest that sensation is intricately linked to rhythmic bodily or interoceptive functions.

Cognitive processing of a common stimulus synchronizes brains, hearts, and eyes

“…For instance, in moments of suspense, viewers might be "holding their breath" and thus changing the dynamic of heart rate, which is closely linked to breathing 56 . Breathing seems to align to the timing of a behavioral task 57 , but here participants were not asked to do anything specific during viewing. Generally, studies that show correlated breathing involve some concurrent physical activity such as singing 44 , speaking 58 or dancing 43 and correlation is not observed during passive listening to speech 59 , though some effects have been found when listening to music 39 .…”

“The great mixing machine”: multisensory integration and brain-breath coupling in the cerebral cortex

“…The influence of respiration on neuronal rhythms in brain areas involved in cognitive and affective functions suggest that the act of breathing could influence cognition and emotion at a behavioral level. This has now been confirmed in several studies showing that cognitive and affective functions are significantly modulated by respiration [3,26,31,37,39,56] (for recent reviews see: [27,28,48]). How respiration drives this seemingly brainwide rhythm is not fully understood.…”

Recent insights into respiratory modulation of brain activity offer new perspectives on cognition and emotion

“…Active alignment of respiration to a task context was also observed by Johannknecht and Kayser (2021), who subjected participants to five different sensory detection and discrimination tasks and a short-term memory tasks. The analysis of task performance in relation to the respiratory cycle showed that participants tended to align their respiratory cycle to the timing of stimuli and their own response times.…”

“…Since the first report of respiratory modulation of delta and gamma oscillations in a nonolfactory part of the mouse neocortex (Ito et al, 2014), a rapidly growing number of publications confirmed the initial findings in both animals and humans. Studies in humans revealed that, as a functional consequence of respiratory modulation of brain activity, cognitive and affective functions are modulated by the respiratory rhythm (Arshamian, Iravani, Majid & Lundstrom, 2018;Grund et al, 2021;Johannknecht & Kayser, 2021;Nakamura, Fukunaga, & Oku, 2018;Perl et al 2019;Zelano et al 2016) (for a recent review see : Heck, Kozma, & Kay, 2019).…”