Neural Responses to Heartbeats Modulate Reward-based Learning and Decision-making as a Function of Anxiety

Interoception is defined as sensing, integration, and regulation of internal states of an organism by the brain. Interoceptive processing plays a significant role in the functioning of a human organism, including homeostasis and allostasis, the perception of self and other, the processing of reality, learning, and decision-making. It has been demonstrated by multiple studies that alterations in interoceptive processing can affect the mental wellbeing of a human individual, for example, indicate proneness to anxiety states. Cardiac processing and the interaction between the heart and the brain is often regarded as a substantial element of interoceptive processing. Heartbeat-evoked responses (HERs) are evoked potentials or evoked fields (in the magnetoencephalographic – MEG – setting) that occur in response to a heartbeat event. HERs can be estimated as brain events time-locked to a T-wave or an R-peak elements of electrocardiogram. Our project is dedicated to detecting heartbeat-evoked responses in high and low trait anxiety populations before the feedback presentation in a volatile reward-based learning paradigm and estimating how the changes in HER amplitude may modulate the learning as a function of trait anxiety.