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Slow-paced breathing associated with slow pupil oscillations and reduced lapses of attention
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  • Ralph Andrews,
  • Michael Melnychuk,
  • Sarah Moran,
  • Teigan Walsh,
  • Sophie Boylan,
  • Paul Dockree
Ralph Andrews
Trinity College Dublin

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Michael Melnychuk
Trinity College Dublin
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Sarah Moran
Trinity College Dublin
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Teigan Walsh
Trinity College Dublin
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Sophie Boylan
Trinity College Dublin
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Paul Dockree
Trinity College Dublin
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Abstract

We tested whether decreasing respiratory frequency would stabilise both behavioural attention and pupil diameter oscillatory activity, compared to a spontaneously breathing control group. Pupil diameter was used as a proxy measure for Locus Coeruleus (LC) activity in order to directly test a prediction from a dynamical systems model (Melnychuk et al 2018) that posits the LC as a mediating nexus between respiration and attention. A novel task was designed, Paced Auditory Cue Entrainment (PACE) task, in which participants responded rhythmically to auditory cues, providing a continuous measure of sustained attention, and additionally, a breath guide for the experimental group. In Experiment 1, the respiratory frequency was guided from 0.15 Hz → 0.1 Hz → 0.15 Hz. In Experiment 2, participants spent a longer duration in each frequency, guided at 0.15 Hz → 0.1 Hz only. The two experiments yielded highly consistent results. Despite no group differences in the variation of the timing of responses, the control group committed significantly more lapses of attention in contrast to the breathing group, which barely committed any of such errors. Additionally, the oscillatory activity of pupil diameter in the breathing group closely tracked the frequency of the instructed breathing, implicating the possibility of LC-noradrenaline activity being entrained by the breath intervention. From these findings we conclude that decreasing respiratory frequency did indeed stabilise attention, mitigating lapses, possibly through stabilising fluctuations in LC activity.
18 Jul 2024Submitted to Psychophysiology
19 Jul 2024Submission Checks Completed
19 Jul 2024Assigned to Editor
19 Jul 2024Review(s) Completed, Editorial Evaluation Pending
22 Jul 2024Reviewer(s) Assigned