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Ege Kingir @ege-kingir.bsky.social · 12d

an interesting perspective to show that respiratory phase alignment is not just coincidental or due to the "rhythm" of repeated trials

bioRxiv Neuroscience @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 12d

The alignment of respiration to sensory-motor events is shaped by expected effort. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.24.678231v1

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Ege Kingir @ege-kingir.bsky.social · Aug 25

And most importantly, special thanks to my supervisors Melanie Wilke and Caspar Schwiedrzik, and my former MSc mentee Sukanya Chakraborty! ✨

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Ege Kingir @ege-kingir.bsky.social · Aug 25

While our use case was visual perception, ACD is super relevant in many other tasks. What excites me is the potential use and further development of this approach in a diverse array of cognitive tasks with anticipation, action-prep, and error-processing to better estimate ACD in these contexts! 🧠

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Ege Kingir @ege-kingir.bsky.social · Aug 25

Despite the small effect size, dissociating the total ACD into its respiratory (RSA) and non-respiratory (ACD) components showed that decreased RSA and a steeper rise in ACD are associated with visual detection.

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Ege Kingir @ege-kingir.bsky.social · Aug 25

While the amplitude of the sine wave in our method corresponds to the amount of RSA, the vertical offset represents the respiratory-phase-independent modulation of the heart rate. In our case, the positive offset is ACD (left). We see that RSA and ACD-based modulations do not co-fluctuate (right).

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Ege Kingir @ege-kingir.bsky.social · Aug 25

So, can the ACD only be caused by this respiratory phase-alignment? We saw that there is a pattern of cardiac deceleration during both exhalation and inhalation, so probably not.
But how to properly quantify a respiratory-phase-independent deceleration?

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Ege Kingir @ege-kingir.bsky.social · Aug 25

Interestingly, our subjects aligned their respiratory phase to exhalation (breathing out) during stimulus anticipation, which in itself supports cardiac deceleration due to RSA. And the amount of RSA in the anticipation window was correlated with the amount of ACD at the between-subject level.

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Ege Kingir @ege-kingir.bsky.social · Aug 25

We present a simple sinusoidal modeling approach to estimate trial-averaged RSA amplitudes for each subject during the anticipation window of our visual perception task (threshold-level visual stimulus detection).

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Ege Kingir @ege-kingir.bsky.social · Aug 25

...but this inevitably leads to contamination from permanent heart rate oscillations driven by respiration (Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia - RSA, or respiratory HRV).

So, we need to account for this to get more accurate estimates of short-term heart rate modulations such as the ACD.

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Ege Kingir @ege-kingir.bsky.social · Aug 25

📰 SUMMARY OF OUR NEW PRE-PRINT 📰

Anticipatory Cardiac Deceleration (ACD) is a temporary slowing down of the heart during the anticipation of task-relevant events.
ACD is typically calculated from the amount of increase in R-R intervals on the ECG signal, which is fair enough...

bioRxiv Neuroscience @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · Aug 21

Disentangling Respiratory Phase-Dependent and Anticipatory Cardiac Deceleration in a Visual Perception Task https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.15.670501v1

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Ege Kingir @ege-kingir.bsky.social · Aug 23

Thank you very much! 😊

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Reposted by Ege Kingir

Alex Galvez-Pol @alexgalvezpol.bsky.social · Jul 25

🚨 We’re running a short self-report study on how BREATHING interacts with your daily life 🫁🌍

We're struggling to find participants and would truly appreciate your help; it only takes a few minutes.

👉 You can participate here: shorturl.at/rwwXc

🙏 Feel free to share the link with others. Thank you!

Breathing Through Your Day: A Brief Reflection Survey

You move, interact, speak, listen, think, and feel. Life unfolds through a rich variety of experiences and tasks.

test.uib.es

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Ege Kingir @ege-kingir.bsky.social · Jun 10

Let me also do a round of hashtags to reach a few visual consciousness researchers that might be interested in our publication:
#consciousness #vision #perception #binocularrivalry
#neuroscience

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Ege Kingir @ege-kingir.bsky.social · Jun 10

🎊 Final version is finally out on Consciousness and Cognition as open-access 🎊

doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

As a lucky coincidence, this means I also get to celebrate my birthday with the first publication of my PhD 🙂

Ege Kingir @ege-kingir.bsky.social · Feb 11

📰 New Pre-Print 📰

[1/9]

There is an increasing interest to study spontaneous transitions in the contents of visual consciousness.

Here, we test the suitability of a novel no-report binocular rivalry paradigm, originally developed by Hesse & Tsao (2020), to study such transitions.

bioRxiv Neuroscience @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · Feb 11

Fixation shifts in a novel 'no-report' binocular rivalry paradigm induce saccade-related perceptual switches https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.09.637085v1

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Ege Kingir @ege-kingir.bsky.social · Mar 13

Thank you for the initiative, I'd love to be added as well! I'm a PhD student working on the interaction between interoceptive signals and sensory perception :)

Ege Kingir @ege-kingir.bsky.social · Mar 13

Thanks a lot! 🧠🫀

Ege Kingir @ege-kingir.bsky.social · Mar 13

Thank you very much!!

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Ege Kingir @ege-kingir.bsky.social · Mar 12

I'm extremely honoured to receive the Young Scientist Award at the MindBrainBody Symposium this year! 🎊

Big thanks to @mpicbs.bsky.social and everyone involved in the organization!!

Already looking forward to share results from my upcoming experiments in the next edition of #MBBS

#MBBS25

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Ege Kingir @ege-kingir.bsky.social · Feb 11

[9/9]: Many thanks to everyone who made this work possible! 🧠
@primatenzentrum.bsky.social
@unigoettingen.bsky.social

Ege Kingir @ege-kingir.bsky.social · Feb 11

[8/9]

Our preprint provides an analysis framework to separate internally generated switches in conscious content, from those that are induced exogenously.

Such categorization is valuable to understand how our brains update conscious content, without AND under exogenous influence.

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Ege Kingir @ege-kingir.bsky.social · Feb 11

[7/9]

Finally, we estimated that 24.4% of all perceptual switch events in Task 1 are induced by saccades, hence not spontaneous.

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Ege Kingir @ege-kingir.bsky.social · Feb 11

[6/9]

Comparing PSLs from our implementation of Hesse & Tsao's paradigm (Task 1) against the continuous binocular rivalry task wherein both external factors are absent (Task 2), we estimated time windows that we can exclude if we want to discard "induced" switches.

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Ege Kingir @ege-kingir.bsky.social · Feb 11

[5/9]

If the FPs jump at t=0 but the subject only fixates to the center (Task 3); there is a small change in perceptual switch latency (PSL) distributions.

If the subject performs saccades while FPs remain stable (Task 4), distribution changes a lot.
Saccades induce time-locked switches!

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Ege Kingir @ege-kingir.bsky.social · Feb 11

[4/9]

We implemented a two-factorial design to test the influence of the two external factors ("visual appearance of the new fixation points" and "requirement for a saccade to follow them") on the timing of perceptual switches.

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Ege Kingir @ege-kingir.bsky.social · Feb 11

[3/9]

But can we use it to study the internally generated transitions between different conscious contents?

The task requires "jumping fixation points" and "subsequent saccades to follow them". This made us wonder if some perceptual transitions (switches) are induced by these factors.

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