Ege Kingir

an interesting perspective to show that respiratory phase alignment is not just coincidental or due to the "rhythm" of repeated trials

And most importantly, special thanks to my supervisors Melanie Wilke and Caspar Schwiedrzik, and my former MSc mentee Sukanya Chakraborty! ✨

While our use case was visual perception, ACD is super relevant in many other tasks. What excites me is the potential use and further development of this approach in a diverse array of cognitive tasks with anticipation, action-prep, and error-processing to better estimate ACD in these contexts! 🧠

Despite the small effect size, dissociating the total ACD into its respiratory (RSA) and non-respiratory (ACD) components showed that decreased RSA and a steeper rise in ACD are associated with visual detection.

While the amplitude of the sine wave in our method corresponds to the amount of RSA, the vertical offset represents the respiratory-phase-independent modulation of the heart rate. In our case, the positive offset is ACD (left). We see that RSA and ACD-based modulations do not co-fluctuate (right).

So, can the ACD only be caused by this respiratory phase-alignment? We saw that there is a pattern of cardiac deceleration during both exhalation and inhalation, so probably not.
But how to properly quantify a respiratory-phase-independent deceleration?

Interestingly, our subjects aligned their respiratory phase to exhalation (breathing out) during stimulus anticipation, which in itself supports cardiac deceleration due to RSA. And the amount of RSA in the anticipation window was correlated with the amount of ACD at the between-subject level.

We present a simple sinusoidal modeling approach to estimate trial-averaged RSA amplitudes for each subject during the anticipation window of our visual perception task (threshold-level visual stimulus detection).

...but this inevitably leads to contamination from permanent heart rate oscillations driven by respiration (Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia - RSA, or respiratory HRV).

So, we need to account for this to get more accurate estimates of short-term heart rate modulations such as the ACD.

📰 SUMMARY OF OUR NEW PRE-PRINT 📰

Anticipatory Cardiac Deceleration (ACD) is a temporary slowing down of the heart during the anticipation of task-relevant events.
ACD is typically calculated from the amount of increase in R-R intervals on the ECG signal, which is fair enough...

Thank you very much! 😊

🚨 We’re running a short self-report study on how BREATHING interacts with your daily life 🫁🌍

We're struggling to find participants and would truly appreciate your help; it only takes a few minutes.

👉 You can participate here: shorturl.at/rwwXc

🙏 Feel free to share the link with others. Thank you!

Let me also do a round of hashtags to reach a few visual consciousness researchers that might be interested in our publication:
#consciousness #vision #perception #binocularrivalry
#neuroscience

🎊 Final version is finally out on Consciousness and Cognition as open-access 🎊

doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

As a lucky coincidence, this means I also get to celebrate my birthday with the first publication of my PhD 🙂

Thank you for the initiative, I'd love to be added as well! I'm a PhD student working on the interaction between interoceptive signals and sensory perception :)

Thanks a lot! 🧠🫀

Thank you very much!!

I'm extremely honoured to receive the Young Scientist Award at the MindBrainBody Symposium this year! 🎊

Big thanks to @mpicbs.bsky.social and everyone involved in the organization!!

Already looking forward to share results from my upcoming experiments in the next edition of #MBBS

#MBBS25

[9/9]: Many thanks to everyone who made this work possible! 🧠
@primatenzentrum.bsky.social
@unigoettingen.bsky.social

[8/9]

Our preprint provides an analysis framework to separate internally generated switches in conscious content, from those that are induced exogenously.

Such categorization is valuable to understand how our brains update conscious content, without AND under exogenous influence.

[7/9]

Finally, we estimated that 24.4% of all perceptual switch events in Task 1 are induced by saccades, hence not spontaneous.

[6/9]

Comparing PSLs from our implementation of Hesse & Tsao's paradigm (Task 1) against the continuous binocular rivalry task wherein both external factors are absent (Task 2), we estimated time windows that we can exclude if we want to discard "induced" switches.

[5/9]

If the FPs jump at t=0 but the subject only fixates to the center (Task 3); there is a small change in perceptual switch latency (PSL) distributions.

If the subject performs saccades while FPs remain stable (Task 4), distribution changes a lot.
Saccades induce time-locked switches!

[4/9]

We implemented a two-factorial design to test the influence of the two external factors ("visual appearance of the new fixation points" and "requirement for a saccade to follow them") on the timing of perceptual switches.

[3/9]

But can we use it to study the internally generated transitions between different conscious contents?

The task requires "jumping fixation points" and "subsequent saccades to follow them". This made us wonder if some perceptual transitions (switches) are induced by these factors.

Figure 2 from Hesse & Tsao (2020): https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.58360

[2/9]

In this elegant paradigm; each rivaling stimulus has its own fixation point (FP) that "jumps" every few seconds, and subjects follow the FP of the perceived object with their eyes.

The paradigm is utilized to show how the conscious and subconscious content is encoded together in macaque IT.

📰 New Pre-Print 📰

[1/9]

There is an increasing interest to study spontaneous transitions in the contents of visual consciousness.

Here, we test the suitability of a novel no-report binocular rivalry paradigm, originally developed by Hesse & Tsao (2020), to study such transitions.

🙋‍♂️