The effect of dyspnea on recognition memory

Dyspnea is a debilitating symptom in various prevalent diseases. Previous research demonstrated several cognitive impairments in dyspneic patients including an impairment in recognition memory. Even though some factors contributing to these impairments have already been identified (e.g., smoking, medication), the relevance of dyspnea as one of those contributing factors is still unclear. Thus, the goal of the current study was to investigate whether acute dyspnea impairs recognition memory in a picture recognition task as indexed by reduced accuracy and a reduced old-new effect in event-related potentials (ERPs) in the electroencephalogram (EEG). Fifty healthy participants underwent a passive encoding phase without dyspnea induction, followed by the picture recognition task performed during an unloaded baseline and a resistive load induced dyspnea condition while EEG was continuously measured. Results indicated comparable accuracy during the baseline and dyspnea condition. A reduced fronto-central old-new effect during dyspnea compared to baseline was found for ERPs in the latency ranges 350–500, 500–800, 800–1100, and 1110–1400 ms. These findings suggest that dyspnea influences the process of familiarity (350–500 ms) and recollection (500–800 ms) as well as post-retrieval processes (800–1100 and 1100–1400 ms), highlighting a potential impairing effect of acute dyspnea on recognition memory.status: publishe