Summary
Bodily signals have a profound influence on cognition and brain activity, which has sparked growing interest in psychology and cognitive neuroscience to explore links between interoception, consciousness, and brain function. The present tutorial offers a comprehensive introduction on how to acquire, preprocess, and analyze signals from the heart, lungs, and stomach, emphasizing both conscious and unconscious effects on cognition. The first three talks address a specific visceral organ each. The heart session examines the influence of the cardiac cycle (systole and diastole) on perception and cognition, as well as how to study neural responses to heartbeats (heartbeat-evoked potentials) and their relationship with mental processes. The respiratory session explores how different breathing phases (inspiration and expiration) impact conscious perception and underlying brain activity. The stomach session introduces the electrogastrogram (EGG), a non-invasive technique to measure stomach activity and its effects on cognition, as well as methods to quantify the connectivity between the brain and the stomach. The final talk covers methods to assess conscious and unconscious perception of internal bodily sensations, including psychophysical and computational models for cardiac and respiratory interoception, as well as experience sampling approaches of broad bodily sensations. Each session features hands-on exercises centered on code examples in R and Matlab demonstrating the different analyses in practice, along with a dedicated Q&A session. By the end of the tutorial, participants will have gained essential tools to integrate the analysis of visceral signals into their own research.
Rationale on speaker selection and proof of their expertise
The selected speakers have a proven track record of significant contributions to brain-body research, coupled with a dedication to educational outreach evidenced through workshops and tutorials. Kluger has made significant contributions to understanding how respiration influences conscious perception and brain activity. Banellis has extensive experience with cardiac and gastric signals, interoception, consciousness research and mental health. Loescher is working on how cardiac, respiratory, and gastric signals influence perception in Tallon-Baudry's Lab. Rebollo's work has focused on how stomach signals influence brain dynamics and cognition.
Crucially, this team has a strong history of previous successful educational courses. Rebollo has performed over eight electrogastrography workshops at various conferences and labs. In the summer of 2024, Kluger, Banellis, and Rebollo conducted a similar workshop as part of the WAVES summer school, with the insights gained being applied in the proposed educational course. Banellis and Rebollo conducted a previous edition of this tutorial at the 26th edition of the ASSC in New York. With over 40 attendees, the workshop received highly positive feedback, underscoring the relevance of this topic for the ASSC community and the capacity of these speakers to attract and captivate a diverse audience. Importantly, the proposed tutorial is tailored specifically for ASSC-2025, with a refined focus on brain-body applications in consciousness research to meet the evolving interests of the community.
Desired educational expectations
This tutorial aims to equip participants with foundational skills for analyzing brain-body interactions, focusing on practical applications.
First, participants will obtain a conceptual understanding of the different ways in which bodily signals can influence perception, cognition, and brain activity. Second, attendees will gain concrete technical skills on how to acquire and preprocess physiological data from cardiac, gastric, and respiratory sources, along with methods to analyze brain-body interactions using EEG and fMRI. Participants will also learn how to assess explicit interoceptive awareness of these signals using different experimental tasks. Finally, we'll ensure attendees learn to apply these methods in their own research by i) providing extensive advice on troubleshooting common issues with data collection and analysis, ii) providing hands-on experience with data and code examples, and iii) extensive time for Q&A sessions.
By the end of this workshop, participants will understand the potential of brain-body interactions for cognitive neuroscience and consciousness research. Practical skills gained here will be applicable across various experimental settings, supporting a wide range of applications in neuroscience and beyond.
Proposed audience engagement
Our previous experience performing educational courses on bodily signals, including our highly successful edition of this course in the 26th edition of the ASSC, have led us to use the following methods of audience engagement.
Each of the four talks includes a hands-on analysis tutorial, in which participants are provided example data and code to perform basic and advanced brain-body interaction analysis. Materials will be available for download via a github repository ahead of the session.
Second, drawing from previous experience in similar workshops, we expect many participants to be early career researchers, some of which are already working on brain-body interactions and come to the workshop with prepared questions. Therefore, we have allocated substantial time for questions and answers.
Planned structure
The workshop is organized into four parts. Each part covers a different bodily signal (heart, stomach, and lungs) plus an additional session focusing on explicit measures of cardiac and respiratory interoception, as well as tools to quantify embodied mind-wandering. Each session consists of a talk introducing background physiology, acquisition, and analysis methods, followed by a practical coding session implementing different analysis steps. Each session also includes a dedicated Q&A segment, with a general Q&A session at the end of the workshop. A 10-minute break is scheduled between sessions 2 and 3.
A proposed time table (assuming a start at 9am) can be found below
- 09:00-09:35: Analyzing Brain-Lung Interactions. Daniel Kluger
- 09:35-09:40: Q&A
- 09:40-10:15: Analyzing Brain-Heart Interactions. Marie Loescher
- 10:15-10:20: Q&A
- 10:20-10:30: Break
- 10:30-11:05: Analyzing Brain-Stomach Interactions. Ignacio Rebollo
- 11:05-11-10: Q&A
- 11:10-11:45: Methods of Quantifying Conscious and Unconscious Perception of Bodily Signals. Leah Banellis
- 11:45-11:50: Q&A
- 11:50-12:00: General Q&A
Rationale on panel inclusivity
We propose an inclusive panel, with members representing different career stages, including an independent principal investigator, senior and junior postdoctoral researchers, and an advanced PhD student. It is composed of individuals from various nationalities (France, Germany, United Kingdom/Greece, Uruguay), ensuring diverse cultural perspectives. The panel is also gender-balanced and includes members of the LGBTQI+ community, and first-generation scientists. Scientifically, the members bring a wide range of expertise, covering different bodily signals and neuroimaging methods (fMRI, EEG, MEG), which effectively complement each other to provide a comprehensive exploration of the topic.
