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Editorial
. 2022 Nov 17:11:e84298.
doi: 10.7554/eLife.84298.

In sync with the heart

Aleksandra M Herman  1
Affiliations
Editorial

In sync with the heart

Aleksandra M Herman. Elife. .

Abstract

People actively adjust how they acquire sensory information, such as tactile cues, based on how their bodily functions alter their senses.

Keywords: active inference; active sensing; cardiac cycle; human; interoception; neuroscience; tactile discrimination; touch.

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Conflict of interest statement

AH No competing interests declared

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.. Schematic representation of the interplay between cardiac cycles and perception.
The heart beats in a cyclic manner. It contracts to actively push blood around the body (systolic phase, red, top centre) and relaxes to refill again (diastolic phase, blue, bottom centre). Using a tactile discrimination task, Galvez-Pol et al. show that the sensitivity of touch decreases during systole: therefore, to compensate, people hold their fingers longer over an object (red clock), especially when the task was more difficult. Conversely, people will hold their fingers on an object for a shorter time if they start touching it during diastole (blue clock).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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