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Response inhibition on the stop signal task improves during cardiac contraction
- Charlotte Rae
- Vanessa Botan
- Cassandra Gould van Praag
- Aleksandra Herman
- Jasmina Nyyssonen
- David Watson
- Theodora Duka
- Sarah Garfinkel
- Hugo Critchley
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Description: 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, or at diastole between heartbeats. Response inhibition, indexed by a shorter stop signal reaction time (SSRT) and longer stop signal delay (SSD), was better at systole. Furthermore, parasympathetic control of cardiovascular tone, and subjective sensitivity to interoceptive states, predicted response inhibition efficiency. 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.