Back

Perceptual reaction times are coupled to the gastric electrical rhythm

Loescher, M.; Wolpert, N.; Tallon-Baudry, C.

2026-01-21 neuroscience
10.64898/2026.01.18.700150 bioRxiv
Show abstract

The gastric rhythm, a slow (0.05 Hz) electrical oscillation continuously generated by the stomach, phase-synchronises neural activity across all sensory and motor cortices. Yet the functional relevance of this coupling remains unknown. We measured in humans the gastric rhythm with electrogastrography in three independent, distinct experiments (total N = 90): a speeded supra-threshold tactile detection task, a self-paced visual exploration task, and an unspeeded near-threshold visual detection task. Leveraging Spline Generalized Linear Modelling to flexibly uncover higher-order phase-amplitude coupling modes, we found perceptual reaction times (RTs) to be coupled to gastric phase across all experiments. Coupling to gastric phase was independent from effects of cardiac and respiratory rhythms rates and phases. By showing that the gastric rhythm contributes to the internal state shaping perceptual variability on a scale comparable to cardiac and respiratory rhythms, this work opens a new avenue for the understanding of the function of gastric-brain coupling.

Matching journals

The top 4 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.