Keynote: Cardiac and auditory regularity encoding in human wakefulness, sleep and coma

Talks

Optimal closed loop cortical stimulation therapy in patients with focal epilepsy in primary motor cortex
Geertjan Huiskamp, PhD
Done
Combining Mobile Brain/Body Imaging with Virtual Reality – new prospects for ecological investigations of human brain function
Prof. Dr. Klaus Gramann
Done
The Neurocognition of Liveness
Dr. Guido Orgs
Done
Optically pumped magnetometers for neuroscience - disruptive or evolutionary?
Dr. Tilmann Sander-Thömmes
Done
Modelling the electrophysiology of hierarchical speech and language processing
Associate Prof. Edmund Lalor
Done
Transcranial magnetic stimulation - mapping, targeting, and computational modeling
Prof. Dr. Thomas R. Knösche
Done
Motor reorganization after stroke: From pathophysiology to treatment strategies
Caroline Tscherpel
Done
Flower electrodes for comfortable dry electroencephalography
Prof. Dr. Jens Haueisen
Done
EEG in health monitoring for long-term spaceflight
Prof. Patrique Fiedler
Done
Introduction
Sebastian Carstens
Done

Location: Room 101 - 11/2/23, 9:15 AM - 11/2/23, 10:00 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) (45 minutes)

Dr. Marzia De Lucia

Senior Lecturer at Lausanne University and Lausanne University Hospital

Marzia De Lucia is a neuroscientist at the Lausanne University Hospital and the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. She studied Physics at the University of La Sapienza in Rome and was a research fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London. After obtaining her PhD, she worked at the Medical Physics Department, University College London. In 2006, she joined the Center for Biomedical Imaging in Lausanne, Switzerland, and in 2016, she was appointed as a senior scientist and lecturer at the University of Lausanne and the University Hospital. Marzia De Lucia’s work focuses on investigating the neural bases of human cognition in altered states of consciousness (coma and sleep) and on developing methods for the analysis of electrophysiological signals in humans.

Across different vigilance states and levels of consciousness, the human brain can process sensory stimuli and generate predictions based on past sensory patterns. While this is evident for environmental stimuli, the role of bodily signals in shaping sensory predictions remains unknown. In this study, I demonstrate that the human brain uses the temporal relationship between cardiac and auditory inputs to anticipate upcoming sounds during wakefulness, sleep, and coma. After administering sounds in synchrony with the ongoing heartbeat, a sound omission triggered both a deceleration in heart rate and a prediction error signal, as measured by the electroencephalographic response. Heartbeat signals support the encoding of auditory regularities across different levels of vigilance and consciousness, highlighting one mechanism for enhancing the detection of unexpected stimuli by leveraging the continuously monitored cardiac signals. Future research will reveal whether cardio-audio regularity encoding is relevant in daily life, where the presence of regular environmental stimuli could recalibrate the ongoing heartbeat to align with the timing of upcoming sensory stimuli, thus facilitating their prediction.