Autonomic space and psychophysiological response

Contemporary findings reveal that autonomic control of dually innervated target organs cannot adequately be viewed as a continuum extending from parasympathetic to sympathetic dominance. Rather, a two-dimensional autonomic space, bounded by sympathetic and parasympathetic axes, is the minimal representation necessary to characterize the multiple modes of autonomic control. We have previously considered the theoretical implications of this view and have developed quantitative conceptual models of the formal properties of autonomic space and its translation into target organ effects. In the present paper, we further develop this perspective by an empirical instantiation of the quantitative autonomic space model for the control of cardiac chronotropy in the rat. We show that this model (a) provides a more comprehensive characterization of cardiac response than simple measures of end-organ state, (b) permits a parsing of the multiple transformations underlying psychophysiological responses, (c) illuminates and subsumes psychophysiological principles, such as the Law of Initial Values, (d) reveals an interpretive advantage of expressing cardiac chronotropy in heart period rather than heart rate, and (e) has fundamental implications for the direction and interpretation of a broad range of psychophysiological studies.