Visual discrimination accuracy does not differ between nasal inhalation and exhalation when stimuli are voluntarily aligned to breathing phase

Effects of respiratory phases on the processing of emotional and non‐emotional visual stimuli

“…All images were converted to grayscale and cropped to remove external features. The reason that only ambiguous fearful expressions were used in the experimental session was to avoid the ceiling effect observed in Mizuhara and Nittono (2022).…”

“…Interoception—the processing of internal bodily signals by the nervous system (Khalsa et al, 2018)—is associated with physical and mental health (Schulz & Vögele, 2015) and emotion (Critchley & Garfinkel, 2017). An increasing number of recent studies has focused on the effect of the respiratory phase—an internal bodily signal—on the perceptual and cognitive processing of external events (e.g., Mizuhara & Nittono, 2022; Perl et al, 2019; Zelano et al, 2016). The present registered report aimed to investigate the association between cyclic autonomic nervous activities (i.e., respiratory phase and cardiac phase) and the perceptual processing of visual stimuli.…”

“…Aiming at practical applications, Mizuhara and Nittono (2022) attempted to extend the previous findings of the relationship between respiratory phases and visual processing (Perl et al, 2019; Zelano et al, 2016) to a situation in which people voluntarily adjusted the timing of stimulus onset to a designated respiratory phase—that is, the onset of inhalation or exhalation for applied reasons. Thirty‐six healthy young adults performed emotional and non‐emotional discrimination tasks that involved choosing fearful facial expressions over neutral ones and choosing high‐contrast Gabor patches over low‐contrast ones.…”

“…The overall trials in the main study would be determined based on the values obtained empirically. Second, was the fear discrimination task used in Mizuhara and Nittono (2022) appropriate for assessing perceptual sensitivity? This issue was tested by examining the effect of the cardiac phase on performance in this task.…”

Respiratory rhythms of the predictive mind.

“…By reestimating the psychophysical function at each bin of the respiratory cycle, the authors found that visual detection became more sensitive during inspiration, and that alpha power was increased during this same time window, suggesting that respiration may help to align rhythms of perception with ongoing neuronal activity. While these studies point toward a potentially unifying role for the modulation of alpha band oscillatory activity by respiration in the visual domain, a recent registered report found no effect of the respiratory cycle on either visual contrast or fearful face discrimination (Mizuhara & Nittono, 2022). The authors interpreted this null finding as possibly being related to the motor component of their task in which participant actively adjusted stimulus presentation timing.…”