Slow-paced breathing associated with slow pupil oscillations and reduced
lapses of attention
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.