Abstract
Motor actions can be facilitated or hindered by psychophysiological states of readiness, to guide rapid adaptive action. Cardiovascular arousal is communicated by cardiac signals conveying the timing and strength of individual heartbeats. Here, we tested how these interoceptive signals facilitate control of motor impulsivity. Participants performed a stop signal task, in which stop cues were delivered at different time points within the cardiac cycle: at systole when the heart contracts (T-wave peak, approximately 300 ms following the R-wave), or at diastole between heartbeats (R-wave peak). Response inhibition was better at systole, indexed by a shorter stop signal reaction time (SSRT), and longer stop signal delay (SSD). Furthermore, parasympathetic control of cardiovascular tone, and subjective sensitivity to interoceptive states, predicted response inhibition efficiency, although these cardiovascular and interoceptive correlations did not survive correction for multiple comparisons. This suggests that response inhibition capacity is influenced by interoceptive physiological cues, such that people are more likely to express impulsive actions during putative states of lower cardiovascular arousal, when frequency and strength of cardiac afferent signalling is reduced.
Highlights
The ability to stop or prevent an inappropriate response is a fundamental feature of adaptive behaviour
We tested whether response inhibition performance would change as a function of the cardiac cycle, during which transient physiological state cues might act as motivating guides for action
We observed that response inhibition efficiency was better, with shorter stop signal reaction time (SSRT), at systole, when the heart is contracting (T-wave peak, approximately 300 ms following the R-wave), compared to when stop cues were presented at diastole, when the heart is relaxed between beats (R-wave peak)
Summary
The ability to stop or prevent an inappropriate response is a fundamental feature of adaptive behaviour. Natural fluctuations in internal state, notably the feedback from individual heartbeats, impact the sensory processing of salient events[3], changing thresholds for the rapid detection of fear and threat stimuli[4] These physiological afferent cues may facilitate more rapid motor reactions to salient events in support of adaptive behaviour. The ejection of blood into the aorta and carotid arteries activates arterial baroreceptors Their phasic firing is relayed to brainstem nuclei, conveying the timing and strength of each cardiac contraction, encoding heart rate and blood pressure, namely, the state of cardiovascular arousal[3]. The systolic facilitation of fear processing represents one important exception[4] These findings raise the question of whether phasic interoceptive signals concerning cardiovascular arousal influence the efficiency with which appropriate action responses are generated or selected. This form of response inhibition is modelled in the laboratory by the stop signal task, in which pre-potent cues to ‘go’ are occasionally followed by a ‘stop’ cue, instructing the participant to abort the action[14]
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