Breathing–Brain Interactions in Emotional Memory: a Preregistered Behavioral Study

Evidence shows how breathing influences brain activity from the cellular level, up to macroscopic connections between different brain areas and its influence may be greater than previously assumed. Studies on both humans and animal species show that breathing not only influences brain areas associated with respiratory coding and olfaction but also interacts with limbic structures related to emotion and memory singularly. Whether respiratory phase modulates the encoding of emotional memories in humans remains untested. This thesis dissertation presents a behavioral study design on how breathing-brain interactions shape emotional memory encoding during an IAPS task. We review the relevant literature and present a task design with its methods and planned data analysis procedure. To support the preregistration a parallel iEEG behavioral data analysis has been performed, with the goal to find a visible breathing-brain interaction in emotional memory encoding. The contents of this work represent the preregistration which will be submitted in the following months. We estimate to publish two different research articles that will be published as part of the same project, with the aim to set a solid base for the next step of electrophysiological research.