Does mindfulness/contemplative training increase objective interoceptive accuracy?

Surfaced explicitly in Farb et al. (2015) as a finding that “contradicts” a natural expectation: if meditators habitually direct attention to bodily sensation, one would expect superior heartbeat-detection accuracy — yet the laboratory evidence does not consistently show this (Khalsa et al. 2008; Parkin et al. 2013).

Why this matters

This is not a null debate — it has real stakes for interpreting every clinical and wellbeing claim in the wiki’s mindfulness literature. If “interoceptive training” doesn’t move the most commonly used objective metric (heartbeat detection), then claims about mindfulness improving interoceptive function must rest on some other construct within the interoceptive-taxonomy — attention tendency, regulation, coherence, sensibility — rather than accuracy per se.

Evidence complicating a simple “no effect” reading

Farb et al. marshal evidence that training effects are real but domain-specific or construct-specific rather than a general accuracy boost:

• Increased sensitivity in the specific domain trained (breath: Daubenmier et al. 2013).
• Reduced errors in body-scan-related somatic signal-detection tasks after even brief training (Mirams et al. 2013).
• Increased coherence between subjective and objective body-sensitivity measures (Fox et al. 2012) and between physiological and subjective states (Sze et al. 2010).
• Bornemann et al. (2014): the commonly assessed “observe” facet of mindfulness questionnaires changes far less with training than the regulatory aspects of interoceptive awareness — suggesting null accuracy findings may partly reflect measuring the wrong construct.

Open question

Whether future studies using the fuller interoceptive-taxonomy (rather than heartbeat-detection accuracy alone) will resolve this into “mindfulness changes regulation/attention, not accuracy” or instead find accuracy effects were simply underpowered/mismeasured remains unsettled. This connects to, but is distinct from, the feedforward-vs-predictive-interoception debate about interoception’s basic processing architecture.