J. Kaiser et al., Evoked cardiac response components in cognitive processing: differential effects of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ACT NEUROB, 59(4), 1999, pp. 329-334
We investigated the mechanism of two evoked cardiac response components ass
ociated with different aspects of information processing. Innocuous stimuli
presented in an irrelevant condition elicit a simple cardiac deceleration
termed ECR1. The same stimuli presented in a relevant condition (such as re
sults from requesting subjects to silently count the stimuli) elicit a comp
lex biphasic response with a large secondary acceleration in heart rate. Th
is difference is attributed to the additional effect of cognitive task perf
ormance, resulting in an addition response component, ECR2. This may be rea
lised by subtraction of the two responses. We:investigated the mechanisms i
nvolved by comparing cardiac response profiles from a neurologically-impair
ed group with those from a control group. amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (AL
S) has been associated with a loss of synaptic connections in the frontal l
obe. Twelve ALS clinically non-demented patients were age-matched with twel
ve neurological patients without pathological changes in the brain. Cardiac
response profiles for ECR1 and ECR2 were examined as a function of group.
ECR1 did not differ between the groups, but ECR2 was significantly impaired
in the ALS patients. The results are discussed in terms of different brain
regions associated with these two cardiac response components. ECR1 may be
associated with automatic preattentive stimulus registration involving, in
the case of auditory stimuli, the auditory analyser and associated pathway
s, while ECR2 appears to be a correlate of controlled executive processing,
involving the frontal cortex.