Disentangling Respiratory Phase-Dependent and Anticipatory Cardiac Deceleration in a Visual Perception Task

The heart does not beat like a metronome: varying parasympathetic input to the heart leads to constant heart rate variability. Vagal cardiomotor neuron activity is coupled to the respiratory cycle, leading to Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA), a permanent oscillation of heart rate synchronized to respiration. Heart rate also temporarily decelerates in specific conditions such as in freezing due to perceived threat, or anticipation of a salient stimulus. Anticipatory Cardiac Deceleration (ACD) is observed consistently in anticipation of a stimulus in perceptual tasks, but its relationship with perceptual performance is debated. Previous quantifications of ACD neglect ongoing heart rate oscillations due to RSA, which may have led to inconsistencies in the ACD-related analyses across studies. Here, we suggest a novel approach to estimate trial-averaged RSA amplitude and respiratory phase-independent cardiac deceleration simultaneously, and apply it to an EEG-ECG dataset from a visual detection task. While the total ACD was not associated with perception, dissociating RSA-based and non-respiratory cardiac modulations revealed that they show opposing effects on perceptual performance. Additionally, we found that participants with higher ACD amplitudes also displayed larger Visual Awareness Negativity potentials, further supporting a contribution of ACD to visual perception.