The Filter Detection Task for measurement of breathing-related interoception and metacognition

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>The study of the brain’s processing of sensory inputs from within the body (‘interoception’) has been gaining rapid popularity in neuroscience, where interoceptive disturbances have been postulated to exist across a wide range of chronic physiological and psychological conditions. Here we present a task and analysis procedure to quantify specific dimensions of breathing-related interoception, including interoceptive sensitivity (accuracy), decision bias, metacognitive bias, and metacognitive performance. We describe a task that is tailored to methods for assessing respiratory interoceptive accuracy and metacognition, and pair this with an established hierarchical statistical model of metacognition (HMeta-d) to overcome significant challenges associated with the low trial numbers often present in interoceptive experiments. Two major new developments have been incorporated into this task analysis by pairing: (i) an adaptive algorithm to maintain task performance at 70-75% accuracy, and (ii) an extended metacognitive model developed to hierarchically estimate multiple regression parameters linking metacognitive performance to relevant (e.g. clinical) variables. We demonstrate the utility of both developments, using both simulated and empirical data from three separate studies. This methodology represents an important step towards accurately quantifying interoceptive dimensions from a simple experimental procedure that is compatible with the practical constraints in clinical settings.</jats:p>

Dissociating breathlessness symptoms from mood in asthma

“…The reported decision from the participant is whether they thought the resistance was on in either the first set or the second set of three breaths, and also again the confidence in their decision. Figure taken from Harrison et al 22 .…”

“…For all except the metacognitive sensitivity analysis, regressions of the EFA scores for the latent factors identified were run against each of the behavioural scores using MATLAB's fitlm function, with significance was set at p < 0.05 and no corrections applied for multiple comparisons. As the metacognitive sensitivity scores are fit within a hierarchical model, we additionally performed an analogous hierarchical fit of a linear regression using the latent factors scores against interoceptive sensitivity (logMratio) 22 . Significance for these hierarchical regression coefficients were assessed using one-tailed 95% highest-density intervals (HDIs) on the regression (beta) parameters, to quantify any potential relationships between greater negative behavioural characteristics (such as breathing symptom scores or negative mood) and worsened metacognitive sensitivity (logMratio).…”

“…Therefore, alongside physiological measures of asthma, here we assessed the breathing-related interoceptive dimensions. These included a measure of sensitivity towards changes in inspiratory resistance, decision bias (towards over-or under-reporting the presence of a resistance), metacognitive bias (average confidence in decisions regarding the presence/absence of a resistance), and metacognitive sensitivity (correspondence between confidence ratings and performance accuracy) using the Filter Detection Task 22 in combination with an established model of metacognition 23 . We additionally assessed the effect of both asthma-related fear words using the Visual Dot Probe Task and general spatial and temporal cues on attention using the Attention Network Task) and completed these assessments in both a group of individuals with asthma and healthy controls.…”

TAPAS: an open-source software package for Translational Neuromodeling and Computational Psychiatry

“…The FD task is a perceptual threshold breathing task where participants have to indicate on each trial whether a very small resistance (i.e., filter) or sham (i.e., empty filter) was applied to the breathing system (yes/no version) (Harrison et al, 2020a), or in which interval resistance was applied (two-interval forced choice version). The task is tailored to assessing respiratory interoceptive accuracy and metacognition in individual participants.…”

The respiratory occlusion discrimination task: A new paradigm to measure respiratory interoceptive accuracy

“…Both these pitfalls complicate the use of adaptive staircase paradigms, which are often used in exteroception research. A recently revised respiratory load differentiation task, the Filter Detection Task (Harrison et al., 2020, based on Garfinkel et al. (2016) and Harver et al.…”