ArticleCognition2021
Relationship between cardiac cycle and the timing of actions during action execution and observation.
Article in Cognition, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 35 citations in OpenAlex.
- Cardiac cycle shapes spinal cord excitability.BMC biology · 2026Article
- Cardiac systole is associated with enhanced go responding in an orthogonalized go/nogo task.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Respiratory and Cardiac Phase Coupling With Voluntary Actions Across Motor Tasks.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- When your heart isn't in it anymore: cardiac correlates of task disengagement.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Cardiac, respiratory, and gastric rhythms independently modulate motor corticospinal excitability in humans.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Heartfelt choices: The influence of cardiac phase on free-choice actions.Psychophysiology · 2024Article
- Timing along the cardiac cycle modulates neural signals of reward-based learning.Nature communications · 2024Article
- A framework for quantifying the coupling between brain connectivity and heartbeat dynamics: Insights into the disrupted network physiology in Parkinson's disease.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
- The role of torso stiffness and prediction in the biomechanics of anxiety: a narrative review.Frontiers in sports and active living · 2024Review
- Cardiac activity impacts cortical motor excitability.PLoS biology · 2023Article
- Interoceptive rhythms in the brain.Nature neuroscience · 2023Review
- Caressed by music: Related preferences for velocity of touch and tempo of music?Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Article
- Brain-heart interactions in the neurobiology of consciousness.Current research in neurobiology · 2022Review
- Effects of interoceptive accuracy on timing control in the synchronization tapping task.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2022Article
- Impact of cardiac interoception cues and confidence on voluntary decisions to make or withhold action in an intentional inhibition task.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Cardiac phase modulates behavior and response related lateralization in visual spatial conflicts during change detection.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.)Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Previous research suggests that there may be a relationship between the timing of motor events and phases of the cardiac cycle. This relationship has thus far only been researched using simple isolated movements such as key-presses in reaction-time tasks and only in a single subject acting alone. Other research has shown both movement and cardiac coordination among interacting individuals. Here, we investigated how the cardiac cycle relates to ongoing self-paced movements in both action execution and observation using a novel dyadic paradigm. We recorded electrocardiography (ECG) in 26 subjects who formed 19 dyads containing an action executioner and observer as they performed a self-paced sequence of movements. We demonstrated that heartbeats are timed to movements during both action execution and observation. Specifically, movements were less likely to culminate synchronously with the heartbeat around the time of the R-peak of the ECG. The same pattern was observed for action observation, with the observer's heartbeats occurring off-phase with movement culmination. These findings demonstrate that there is coordination between an action executioner's cardiac cycle and the timing of their movements, and that the same relationship is mirrored in an observer. This suggests that previous findings of interpersonal coordination may be caused by the mirroring of a phasic relationship between movement and the heart.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.