People can identify the likely owner of heartbeats by looking at individuals’ faces

Abstract

For more than a century it has been proposed that visceral and vasomotor changes inside the body influence and reflect our experience of the world. For instance, cardiac rhythms (heartbeats and consequent heart rate) reflect psychophysiological processes that underlie our cognition and affective experience. Yet, considering that we usually infer what others do and feel through vision, whether people can identify the most likely owner of a given bodily rhythm by looking at someone's face remains unknown. To address this, we developed a novel two-alternative forced-choice task in which 120 participants watched videos showing two people side by side and visual feedback from one of the individuals' heartbeats in the centre. Participants' task was to select the owner of the depicted heartbeats. Across five experiments, one replication, and supplementary analyses, the results show that: i) humans can judge the most likely owner of a given sequence of heartbeats significantly above chance levels, ii) that performance in such a task decreases when the visual properties of the faces are altered (inverted, masked, static), and iii) that the difference between the heart rates of the individuals portrayed in our 2AFC task seems to contribute to participants' responses. While we did not disambiguate the type of information used by the participants (e.g., knowledge about appearance and health, visual cues from heartbeats), the current work represents the first step to investigate the possible ability to infer or perceive others' cardiac rhythms. Overall, our novel observations and easily adaptable paradigm may generate hypotheses worth examining in the study of human and social cognition.