The heart rate discrimination task: a psychophysical method to estimate the accuracy and precision of interoceptive beliefs

Abstract

Interoception - the physiological sense of our inner bodies - has risen to the forefront of psychological and psychiatric research. Much of this research utilizes tasks that attempt to measure the ability to accurately detect cardiac signals. Unfortunately, these approaches are confounded by well-known issues limiting their validity and interpretation. At the core of this controversy is the role of subjective beliefs about the heart rate in confounding measures of interoceptive accuracy. Here, we recast these beliefs as an important part of the causal machinery of interoception, and offer a novel psychophysical "heart rate discrimination" method to estimate their accuracy and precision. By applying this task in 218 healthy participants, we demonstrate that cardiac interoceptive beliefs are more biased, less precise, and are associated with poorer metacognitive insight relative to a matched exteroceptive control. Our task, provided as an open-source python package, offers users an intuitive, robust approach to quantifying cardiac beliefs.

The Role of Interoceptive Sensibility and Emotional Conceptualization for the Experience of Emotions

“…Confidence about the accuracy of an individual in behavioral performance, and potentially, when detecting bodily changes and emotions, is an important aspect to guide adaptive behavior, particularly in the absence of feedback (Fleming and Daw, 2017). In this line, a positive association has been found between confidence and objective accuracy in various tasks (e.g., Yonelinas, 2002;Martino et al, 2013;Fleming and Daw, 2017;Murphy et al, 2020;Legrand et al, 2021).…”

What Might Interoceptive Inference Reveal about Consciousness?

“…Interoceptive self-inference then predicts that sampling of the interoceptive trajectory can be used to estimate the volatility of external states. Cognitive and perceptual biases (e.g., exteroceptive and metacognitive) may then arise from treating interoceptive noise as exteroceptive, such that experimental modulation of interoceptive noise could shift the cognitive bias, as partially demonstrated in recent investigations of interoception and metacognition [129,135,136]. In parallel, conscious experience may then entail the prioritisation of environmental stimuli which are pertinent to the body's contingencies; for example by increasing the salience of the smell of food when we are hungry.…”

Characterising the Photoplethysmography Pulse Waveform for Use in Human Neuroscience: The Hybrid Excess and Decay (HED) Model

“…Related to the above, the growing field of interoceptive neuroscience and its focus on measures that characterize subjective and objective elements of brain-body interaction would appear to be complementary to the work presented here Critchley and Garfinkel, 2015; Khalsa et al, 2018; Allen et al 2020; Allen 2020) Heartbeat detection tasks have been used frequently to measure interoceptive perceptual ability (Brener and Ring, 2016) since heartbeats represent a convenient interoceptive signal, and subjective perception of heartbeats reported by participants can be compared with objective measurement of these beats. However, PPG measures that go beyond simple indices of systole and diastole in relating interoceptive abilities to psychological states may be of value in developing our understanding of links between cardiovascular states and interoception (Schandry, Bestler and Montoya, 1993), including studies that employ peripheral perturbations to modulate pulsatility of the vascular tree in healthy (Khalsa, et al 2009), psychiatric (Khalsa et al 2015) and neurological populations (Khalsa et al 2009), and those examining the accuracy and precision of metacognitive beliefs (Garfinkel et al 2016; Legrand et al 2021), possibly in combination. While the subjective experience that forms the basis for successful cardiac interoception (i.e.…”