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Paci M, Cardellicchio P, Di Luzio P, Perrucci MG, Ferri F, Costantini M. When the heart inhibits the brain: Cardiac phases modulate short-interval intracortical inhibition. iScience 2024; 27:109140. [PMID: 38414850 PMCID: PMC10897847 DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2024.109140] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/31/2023] [Revised: 11/18/2023] [Accepted: 02/01/2024] [Indexed: 02/29/2024] Open
Abstract
The phasic cardiovascular activity influences the central nervous system through the systolic baroreceptor inputs, inducing widespread inhibitory effects on behavior. Through transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) delivered during resting-state over the left primary motor cortex and across the different cardiac phases, we measured corticospinal excitability (CSE) and distinct indices of intracortical motor inhibition: short (SICI) and long (LICI) interval, corresponding to GABAA and GABAB neurotransmission, respectively. We found a significant effect of the cardiac phase on short-intracortical inhibition, without any influence on LICI. Specifically, SICI was stronger at systole compared to diastole. These results show a tight relationship between the cardiac cycle and the inhibitory neurotransmission within M1, and in particular with GABAA-ergic-mediated motor inhibition. We hypothesize that this process requires greater motor control via the gating mechanism and that this, in turn, needs to be recalibrated through the modulation of intracortical inhibition.
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Affiliation(s)
- Mario Paci
- Department of Neuroscience, Imaging and Clinical Science, University G. D’Annunzio, Chieti-Pescara, Chieti, Italy
| | - Pasquale Cardellicchio
- IIT@UniFe Center for Translational Neurophysiology, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Via Fossato di Mortara, 17-19, 44121 Ferrara, Italy
- Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Unit, IRCCS Istituto Giannina Gaslini, Genoa, Italy
- Department of Neuroscience and Rehabilitation, Section of Physiology, Università di Ferrara, Via Fossato di Mortara, 17-19, 44121 Ferrara, Italy
| | - Paolo Di Luzio
- Department of Psychological, Health, and Territorial Sciences, University G. D’Annunzio, Chieti-Pescara, Chieti, Italy
| | - Mauro Gianni Perrucci
- Department of Neuroscience, Imaging and Clinical Science, University G. D’Annunzio, Chieti-Pescara, Chieti, Italy
- Institute for Advanced Biomedical Technologies - ITAB, University G. D’Annunzio, Chieti-Pescara, Chieti, Italy
| | - Francesca Ferri
- Department of Neuroscience, Imaging and Clinical Science, University G. D’Annunzio, Chieti-Pescara, Chieti, Italy
- Institute for Advanced Biomedical Technologies - ITAB, University G. D’Annunzio, Chieti-Pescara, Chieti, Italy
| | - Marcello Costantini
- Institute for Advanced Biomedical Technologies - ITAB, University G. D’Annunzio, Chieti-Pescara, Chieti, Italy
- Department of Psychological, Health, and Territorial Sciences, University G. D’Annunzio, Chieti-Pescara, Chieti, Italy
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2
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Yao B, Gu P, Lasagna CA, Peltier S, Taylor SF, Tso IF, Thakkar KN. Structural connectivity of an interoception network in schizophrenia. Psychiatry Res Neuroimaging 2023; 331:111636. [PMID: 37001298 PMCID: PMC10133183 DOI: 10.1016/j.pscychresns.2023.111636] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Submit a Manuscript] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/12/2022] [Revised: 03/21/2023] [Accepted: 03/25/2023] [Indexed: 04/08/2023]
Abstract
Interoception refers to the processing, integration, and interpretation of bodily signals by the brain. Interoception is key to not only basic survival, but also motivational and affective functioning. There is emerging evidence suggesting altered interoception in schizophrenia, but few studies have explored potential neural underpinnings. The current study aims to investigate the anatomical connectivity of a previously identified interoception network in individuals with schizophrenia, and the relationship between network structural connectivity and both emotional functioning and clinical symptoms. Thirty-five participants with schizophrenia (SZ) and 36 healthy control participants (HC) underwent diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and performed tasks measuring emotional functioning. Probabilistic tractography was used to identify white matter tracts connecting key hubs in an interoception network. Microstructural integrity of these tracts was compared across groups and correlated with measures of emotional functioning and symptom severity. Compared with HC, SZ exhibited altered structural connectivity in the interoception network. In HC, the structural connectivity of the network was significantly correlated with emotion recognition, supporting a link between the interoception network and emotional functioning. However, this correlation was much weaker in SZ. These findings suggest that altered interoception may have implications for illness mechanisms of schizophrenia, especially in relation to emotional deficits.
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Affiliation(s)
- Beier Yao
- Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder Program, McLean Hospital, Belmont, MA, USA; Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
| | - Pan Gu
- Department of Neuroscience, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, USA
| | - Carly A Lasagna
- Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
| | - Scott Peltier
- Functional MRI Laboratory, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA; Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
| | - Stephan F Taylor
- Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA; Department of Psychiatry, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
| | - Ivy F Tso
- Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Health, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
| | - Katharine N Thakkar
- Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA; Division of Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine, Michigan State University, Grand Rapids, MI, USA
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Yang X, Spangler DP, Jennings JR, Friedman BH. Cardiac timing and threatening stimuli influence response inhibition and ex-Gaussian parameters of reaction time in a Go/No-go task. Psychophysiology 2023; 60:e14260. [PMID: 36717691 DOI: 10.1111/psyp.14260] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/20/2022] [Revised: 12/21/2022] [Accepted: 01/04/2023] [Indexed: 02/01/2023]
Abstract
Sensorimotor responses vary as a function of the cardiac cycle phase. These effects, known as cardiac cycle time effects, have been explained by the inhibition of cardiac afferent signals on information processing. However, the validity of cardiac cycle time effects is challenged by mixed findings. Factors such as current information processing and affective context may modulate cardiac cycle time effects and account for inconsistencies in the literature. The current study examines the influence of cardiac cycle time and threatening stimuli on two aspects of sensorimotor processing, response speed and inhibition. Thirty-four participants (Mage = 19.35 years; 29 female) completed an auditory Go/No-go task in no face, neutral face, and fearful face conditions. Faces were presented at either cardiac diastole or systole. Participants' reaction times (RTs) during Go trials and failures in response inhibition during No-go trials were recorded. The ex-Gaussian model was fit to RT data in each condition deriving the parameters, mu (μ) and tau (τ), that indicate response speed and attentional lapses, respectively. Repeated measures ANOVA were used to analyze behavioral data. Results showed that cardiac systole prolonged μ but decreased τ, and that cardiac diastole reduced inhibition errors in the fearful face condition but not in other conditions. These findings indicate that cardiac timing differentially modulates sensory-perceptual and top-down attentional processes and cardiac timing interacts with threatening contexts to influence response inhibition. These results highlight the specificity of cardiac cycle time effects on sensorimotor processing.
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Affiliation(s)
- Xiao Yang
- Department of Psychology, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia, USA
| | - Derek P Spangler
- Department of Biobehavioral Health, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA
| | - J Richard Jennings
- Department of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
- Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
| | - Bruce H Friedman
- Department of Psychology, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA
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Mizuhara K, Nittono H. Effects of respiratory phases on the processing of emotional and non-emotional visual stimuli. Psychophysiology 2023; 60:e14261. [PMID: 36715139 DOI: 10.1111/psyp.14261] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/27/2021] [Revised: 01/09/2023] [Accepted: 01/09/2023] [Indexed: 01/31/2023]
Abstract
The number of studies investigating the relationship between respiratory phases and cognitive/neural processing of external events has been increasing, but the findings remain controversial. This registered report examined the effect of the respiratory phase on the discrimination accuracy of visual stimuli in the emotional and non-emotional domains. Forty-two healthy young participants were asked to choose fearful over neutral facial expressions and to choose high-contrast over low-contrast Gabor patches during spontaneous nasal respiration. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were also recorded for each type of stimulus presented during each respiratory phase. It was hypothesized that discrimination accuracy would be higher when the stimuli were presented during inhalation than during exhalation. It was also hypothesized that the amplitudes of ERPs elicited by the stimuli would be greater during inhalation than during exhalation. For comparison, the effect of the cardiac phase was examined, with the expectation that discrimination accuracy would be higher when the stimuli were presented during systole than during diastole. It was also hypothesized that the amplitudes of ERPs elicited by the stimuli would be greater during systole than during diastole. As expected, the results indicated that fear discrimination accuracy was higher during inhalation than exhalation and during systole than diastole. However, this was not the case for contrast discrimination. No differences in ERPs were observed between respiratory phases in either task. These results suggest that natural breathing in through the nose facilitates the discrimination of emotional stimuli, possibly via subcortical processes.
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Affiliation(s)
- Keita Mizuhara
- Graduate School of Human Sciences, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan.,Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Tokyo, Japan
| | - Hiroshi Nittono
- Graduate School of Human Sciences, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan
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Parviainen T, Lyyra P, Nokia MS. Cardiorespiratory rhythms, brain oscillatory activity and cognition: review of evidence and proposal for significance. Neurosci Biobehav Rev 2022; 142:104908. [DOI: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2022.104908] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/10/2022] [Revised: 09/26/2022] [Accepted: 10/05/2022] [Indexed: 11/28/2022]
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The relationship between interoception and agency and its modulation by heartbeats: an exploratory study. Sci Rep 2022; 12:13624. [PMID: 35948567 PMCID: PMC9365823 DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-16569-6] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/16/2022] [Accepted: 07/12/2022] [Indexed: 11/29/2022] Open
Abstract
Interoception, the sense of the internal physiological state of the body, theoretically underpins aspects of self-representation. Experimental studies link feelings of body ownership to interoceptive perception, yet few studies have tested for association between the sense of agency and interoceptive processing. Here, we combined an intentional binding paradigm with cardiac measures of interoceptive processing (behavioural performance on a heartbeat discrimination task, and effects of timing within the cardiac cycle) in twenty-six non-clinical participants as an exploratory study. We found performance accuracy on the heartbeat discrimination task correlated positively with the intentional binding effect, an index of sense of agency (β = 0.832, p = 0.005), even after controlling for effects of age, sex, educational level, heart rate, heart rate variability and time accuracy. The intentional binding effect was enhanced during cardiac systole (compared to diastole) in individuals with greater heartbeat discrimination accuracy (β = 0.640, p = 0.047). These findings support the proposal that interoception contributes to mechanisms underlying the emergence of sense of agency.
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Ren Q, Marshall AC, Schütz-Bosbach S. Response Inhibition is Disrupted by Interoceptive Processing at Cardiac Systole. Biol Psychol 2022; 170:108323. [DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2022.108323] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/26/2021] [Revised: 02/24/2022] [Accepted: 03/22/2022] [Indexed: 11/02/2022]
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Sherman MT, Wang HT, Garfinkel SN, Critchley HD. The Cardiac Timing Toolbox (CaTT): Testing for physiologically plausible effects of cardiac timing on behaviour. Biol Psychol 2022; 170:108291. [PMID: 35202742 DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2022.108291] [Citation(s) in RCA: 6] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/15/2021] [Revised: 02/19/2022] [Accepted: 02/19/2022] [Indexed: 12/13/2022]
Abstract
There is a long history of, and renewed interest in, cardiac timing effects on behaviour and cognition. Cardiac timing effects may be identified by expressing events as a function of their location in the cardiac cycle, and applying circular (i.e. directional) statistics to test cardiac time-behaviour associations. Typically this approach 'stretches' all points in the cardiac cycle equally, but this is not necessarily physiologically valid. Moreover, many tests impose distributional assumptions that are not met by such data. We present a set of statistical techniques robust to this, instantiated within our new Cardiac Timing Toolbox (CaTT) for MATLAB: A physiologically-motivated method of wrapping behaviour to the cardiac cycle; and a set of non-parametric statistical tests that control for common confounds and distributional characteristics of these data. Using a reanalysis of previously published data, we guide readers through analyses using CaTT, aiding researchers in identifying physiologically plausible associations between heart-timing and cognition.
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Affiliation(s)
- Maxine T Sherman
- Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK; Brighton and Sussex Medical School, Brighton, UK; School of Engineering and Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK.
| | - Hao-Ting Wang
- Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK; Brighton and Sussex Medical School, Brighton, UK
| | - Sarah N Garfinkel
- Brighton and Sussex Medical School, Brighton, UK; Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL, London, UK
| | - Hugo D Critchley
- Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK; Brighton and Sussex Medical School, Brighton, UK
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Interoception abnormalities in schizophrenia: A review of preliminary evidence and an integration with Bayesian accounts of psychosis. Neurosci Biobehav Rev 2021; 132:757-773. [PMID: 34823914 DOI: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2021.11.016] [Citation(s) in RCA: 17] [Impact Index Per Article: 5.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/19/2021] [Revised: 10/31/2021] [Accepted: 11/13/2021] [Indexed: 01/07/2023]
Abstract
Schizophrenia research has traditionally focused almost exclusively on how the brain interprets the outside world. However, our internal bodily milieu is also central to how we interpret the world and construct our reality: signals from within the body are critical for not only basic survival, but also a wide range of brain functions from basic perception, emotion, and motivation, to sense of self. In this article, we propose that interoception-the processing of bodily signals-may have implications for a wide range of clinical symptoms in schizophrenia and may thus provide key insights into illness mechanisms. We start with an overview of interoception pathways. Then we provide a review of direct and indirect findings in various interoceptive systems in schizophrenia and interpret these findings in the context of computational frameworks that model interoception as hierarchical Bayesian inference. Finally, we propose a conceptual model of how altered interoceptive inference may contribute to specific schizophrenia symptoms-negative symptoms in particular-and suggest directions for future research, including potential new avenues of treatment.
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10
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Be still my heart: Cardiac regulation as a mode of uncertainty reduction. Psychon Bull Rev 2021; 28:1211-1223. [PMID: 33755894 DOI: 10.3758/s13423-021-01888-y] [Citation(s) in RCA: 8] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Accepted: 01/23/2021] [Indexed: 01/26/2023]
Abstract
Decreased heart rate (HR) and variability (HRV) are well-established correlates of attention; however, the functional significance of these dynamics remains unclear. Here, we investigate whether attention-related cardiac modulation is sensitive to different varieties of uncertainty. Thirty-nine adults performed a binocular rivalry-replay task in which changes in visual perception were driven either internally (in response to constant, conflicting stimuli; rivalry) or externally (in response to physically alternating stimuli; replay). Tonic HR and high-frequency HRV linearly decreased as participants progressed from resting-state baseline (minimal visual uncertainty) through replay (temporal uncertainty) to rivalry (temporal uncertainty and ambiguity). Time-resolved frequency estimates revealed that cardiac deceleration was sustained throughout the trial period and modulated by ambiguity, novelty, and switch rate. These findings suggest cardiac regulation during active attention may play an instrumental role in uncertainty reduction.
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