Keynote: Cardiac and auditory regularity encoding in human wakefulness, sleep and coma
Location: Room 101 - 11/2/23, 9:15 AM - 11/2/23, 10:00 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) (45 minutes)
Keynote: Cardiac and auditory regularity encoding in human wakefulness, sleep and coma
Dr. Marzia De Lucia
Senior Lecturer at Lausanne University and Lausanne University Hospital
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.