The field of cardioception has received considerable attention from the scientific community for close to fifty years (Brener & Ring, 2016;Jones, 1994). Heartbeat sensations are caused by pulsatile mechanical stimuli generated by ventricular contraction. However, the types of mechanoreceptors and the afferent pathways (interoceptive, somatosensory, exteroceptive) responsible for transducing heartbeat sensations and conveying the information to the brain have yet to be identified. Despite this, measurements of the accuracy of heartbeat detection are the most common means of assessing individual differences in interoceptive sensitivity, creating confusion about what is meant by interoception.
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