A psychophysiological investigation of the interplay between orienting and executive control during stimulus conflict: A heart rate variability study

Background: It has been hypothesized that resting state cardiac vagal activity (CVA) - an indicator of para-sympathetic nervous system activity - is a specific psychophysiological marker of executive control function.Here, we propose an alternative hypothesis - that CVA is associated with early stage attention orientation,promoting theflexible uptake of new information, on which the later operation of such executive controlfunctions depends. We therefore predicted that CVA would predict the interaction between orienting and ex-ecutive control. This was tested using the revised version of the Attention Network Test (ANT-R) that wasdeveloped to distinguish between orienting and executive attention during a stimulus conflict task.
Methods: Healthy adults (N= 48) performed the ANT-R and their resting CVA was measured over a 5 min periodusing ECG recordings.
Results: Multiple regression analyses indicated that, when other factors were controlled for, CVA was morestrongly associated with the interaction between the orienting and executive control terms than with eitherfactor individually.
Conclusion: Higher levels of CVA are specifically implicated in the modulation of executive control by intrinsicorientation operating at early stages of conflict detection. These initialfindings of higher CVA on orientingattention in conflict detection need to be replicated in larger samples.