When the heart and the brain meet: Cardiac-neural coupling in feature integration

Abstract

In contemporary Cognitive Neuroscience, increasing attention is devoted to brain-body interactions, as an expanding body of literature suggests that processing the external world may not emerge from the brain in isolation but rather from the coordinated contribution of multiple bodily systems. These interactions have been extensively studied in the context of interoception. However, evidence linking them to visual perception remains scarce. To address this gap, the present study examines heart-brain interactions during a visual feature integration task. The task of the participants required shape and color integration of features to identify a target while inhibiting distractor-related information. Cardiac and neural activity were simultaneously recorded, enabling the assessment of the heart rate (HR), heart-evoked potentials (HEP), and, albeit seldom reported previously, heart-evoked oscillations (HEO). Pre-stimulus cardiac-related neural activity differed between correctly and incorrectly integrated features. HEO analysis revealed alpha and low beta band modulations before target onset, which vanished when cardiac time-locking was removed, indicating that they were specifically driven by brain-heart coupling rather than by ongoing brain activity alone. These findings provide the first evidence that HEO dynamics contribute to successful perceptual integration and extend previous work on HEPs from stimulus detection to higher-level perceptual processes. More broadly, they suggest that cardiac signals shape early brain states that bias perception, supporting theoretical frameworks proposing an active role for bodily signals in perceptual processing. HighlightsO_LIPre-stimulus heart-evoked potentials differ between correct and incorrect feature integration. C_LIO_LIHeartbeat-locked alpha and low beta activity increase before correct feature integration C_LIO_LIPre-stimulus oscillatory effects vanish without cardiac activity, revealing HEO contribution. C_LIO_LIBrain-heart coupling biases perceptual outcomes. C_LI