Key result
Threat of dyspnea, but not dyspnea itself, reduced error awareness (smaller Pe amplitudes) compared to baseline, while neither impacted early error processing or behavioral task performance.
Why the study?
Does experimentally induced dyspnea or threat of dyspnea affect error processing and behavioral task performance in healthy participants?
Does experimentally induced dyspnea or threat of dyspnea affect error processing and behavioral task performance in healthy participants?
Answers are grounded in this paper and cite their sources.
Threat of dyspnea, but not dyspnea itself, reduces error awareness (Pe amplitude), while neither impacts early error processing or behavioral performance.
Dyspnea (breathlessness) is a threatening and aversive bodily sensation and a major symptom of various diseases. It has been suggested to impair several aspects of functioning in affected patients, but experimental proof for this assumption is widely absent. Error processing is an important domain of functioning and has intensively been studied using electrophysiological measures. Specifically, the error-related negativity (ERN) has been suggested to reflect early performance monitoring and error detection, while the error positivity (Pe) has been linked to subsequent error awareness. So far, little is known about the effects of anticipated or perceived dyspnea on error processing. Therefore, in 49 healthy participants, we studied the effects of experimentally induced dyspnea and threat of dyspnea on the ERN/Pe and behavioral task performance. Participants performed the arrowhead version of the flanker task during three experimental conditions: an unloaded baseline condition, a dyspnea condition, and a threat of dyspnea condition. Dyspnea was induced by breathing through inspiratory resistive loads, while high-density EEG was continuously measured. No differences in task performance (reaction times, error rates) and ERN mean amplitudes were found between conditions. However, mean amplitudes for the Pe differed between conditions with smaller Pe amplitudes during threat of dyspnea compared to baseline and dyspnea conditions, with the latter two conditions showing no difference. These results may suggest that threat of dyspnea, but not dyspnea itself, reduces error awareness, while both seem to have no impact on early error processing and related behavioral performance.
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Sucec et al. (2018) studied Healthy (n=49). Experimentally induced dyspnea and threat of dyspnea vs. Unloaded baseline condition was evaluated on ERN/Pe mean amplitudes and behavioral task performance. Threat of dyspnea, but not dyspnea itself, reduced error awareness (smaller Pe amplitudes) compared to baseline, while neither impacted early error processing or behavioral task performance.
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