When the heart and the brain meet: Brain-heart interactions in feature integration
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
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 reanalyses a previously published dataset from 25 participants to investigate heart-brain interactions during a visual feature integration task. Participants were required to integrate shape and colour 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 HEP amplitude briefly differed between correctly and incorrectly integrated features. HEO analysis revealed alpha and low beta band modulations before target onset. These effects were absent when the analyses were aligned to external events and exceeded surrogate distributions obtained after disrupting heartbeat–EEG alignment, indicating that they depended on cardiac timing rather than on spontaneous prestimulus EEG differences alone. These findings provide preliminary evidence that HEO dynamics are associated with successful perceptual integration and extend previous work on HEPs from stimulus detection to higher-level perceptual processes. More broadly, they suggest that heartbeat-locked neural activity may influence early brain states linked to perceptual outcomes, aligning with theoretical frameworks proposing an active role for bodily signals in perceptual processing. Highlights A brief pre-stimulus HEP amplitude differs between correct and incorrect feature integration. Alpha and low beta HEO increases before correct feature integration. Pre-stimulus oscillatory effects disappeared when analyses were time-locked to external events rather than cardiac activity. Convergent HEP and HEO findings suggest a role for brain-heart interactions in visual perception
Language: English
Subfield: Cardiology and Cardiovascular Medicine
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7162396116