Taking a deep breath to get a clearer picture is perhaps more effective than you might think. Breathing has a physiological impact on the perception of visual stimuli. This is what emerges from the work of Juliane Britz, a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Fribourg. She has set up an experiment demonstrating that cardiac and respiratory rhythms have an impact on how we become conscious of a visual stimulus. The results of this study, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), have just been published in the journal PNAS. (SNSF press release)