­Cardiac cycle and respiration phase affect responses to the conditioned stimulus in young adults trained in trace eyeblink conditioning

Rhythms of breathing and heartbeat are linked to each other as well as to rhythms of the brain. Our recent studies suggest that presenting the conditioned stimulus during expiration or during the diastolic phase of the cardiac cycle facilitates neural processing of that stimulus and improves learning an eyeblink classical conditioning task. To date, it has not been examined whether utilizing information from both respiration and cardiac cycle phases simultaneously allows even more efficient modulation of learning. Here we studied whether the timing of the conditioned stimulus to different cardiorespiratory rhythm phase combinations affects learning trace eyeblink conditioning in healthy you…