Peripheral physiological decoding of arousal in a boundary-avoidance task: signal validity and individualized control

OBJECTIVE: Scoring well on a task-demand label does not show that a decoder measures arousal. We ask whether peripheral physiology decodes demand better than EEG, whether the index behaves like graded arousal rather than a clock, and what a controller could do with it. Approach. We re-analysed a public boundary-avoidance flight task in which sixteen participants received EEG neurofeedback, half-sham feedback or silence. A decoder trained on peripheral signals (cardiac, respiratory, electrodermal, pupillometric) from an open-loop calibration block was compared with a retrained EEG decoder, filter-bank common spatial patterns, and motor-only and shuffled-label controls. All analyses are offline; the decoder was never in the loop. Main results. The peripheral decoder reached 93.0% within-subject AUC against 85.2% for EEG. Ring size shrinks on a fixed schedule, so accuracy alone cannot separate arousal from trial position. Three tests did: 48.6% of hard-course trials ended below the scale midpoint; the index separated the courses at matched elapsed time (p= 1.4 ×10-31), where EEG did not; and it tracked the autonomic channels. Only the peripheral index recovered an inverted-U with performance, robust in a duration-safe hazard analysis (p= 3.5 ×10-10). Arousal rose 14.1 points in the 10 s before failure; sustained between-condition differences above 7.5 points are excluded. Subjects varied reliably in how strongly excess arousal predicted failure, predictably from pre-loop calibration. Personalised control bands gave the best held-out discrimination, though at N = 16 indistinguishable from a retuned universal band. Significance. Arousal is a state of the whole body, and here the body reads it better than the scalp. The results separate three often-conflated requirements: accuracy on a demand label, validity as an arousal signal, and usefulness for control. The signal that added information over a fixed rule was distance above a band set by each subject's recent variability.