When the Heart Meets the Mind: Exploring the Brain-Heart Interaction during Time Perception.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Psychophysiology
• Human Time Perception

Background:

• Emerging evidence links time estimation to internal bodily signals and rhythms.
• Previous research has not directly measured electrophysiological correlates of heartbeat processing during duration judgment.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the electrophysiological association between heartbeat processing and duration judgment.
• To explore the role of interoceptive awareness and accuracy in time estimation.

Main Methods:

• Measured heartbeat-evoked potentials (HEP) and contingent negative variation (CNV) during auditory duration-reproduction and reaction-time tasks.
• Assessed interoceptive awareness using the Self-Awareness Questionnaire (SAQ) and interoceptive accuracy via the heartbeat-counting task (HCT).
• Analyzed brain activity across 4, 8, and 12-second intervals in male and female participants.

Main Results:

• Higher SAQ scores correlated with more accurate and longer duration reproductions.
• HEP amplitudes showed interval-specific modulations during the timing task, unlike the control task.
• A ramp-like increase in HEP2 during duration encoding correlated with reproduced durations, with larger increases predicting under-reproduction.

Conclusions:

• Cortical responses to heartbeats (HEP) are modulated by time estimation demands.
• Interoceptive awareness, but not accuracy, predicts duration reproduction performance.
• Findings support an embodied perspective on time perception, linking it to internal bodily signals.