Research gap at a glance
- Question: Do people with panic disorder show worse respiratory tracking, or a larger cost when the mapping between breath and feedback is perturbed, and does any difference persist when visual feedback is removed?
- Why it matters: Panic theories describe a misreading of respiratory sensation, but interoception has almost always been measured as perception. A control deficit would add a second mechanism and a new treatment target; showing that the task depends on interoceptive rather than visual information is a precondition for interpreting any result.
- Theme: Clinical
- Status: open
What the wiki already knows
- The Cognitive model of panic and Anxiety sensitivity are theories of catastrophic misreading of respiratory sensation; whether panic also involves a control deficit is described as untested and clinically pointed (Interoceptive control).
- The respiratory tracking task scores control ability under veridical feedback and a perturbation ratio for remapping cost; in validation, fatigue degraded the ratio while leaving ability intact (Respiratory tracking task with visuomotor perturbation (respyra), Allen (2026)).
- Participants watch a screen showing their breathing, so tracking may rest on vision rather than interoception; removing or degrading feedback, correlating with respiratory sensitivity, and perturbing the afference are proposed but unrun (Respiratory tracking task with visuomotor perturbation (respyra)).
- Respiration is the only voluntarily drivable interoceptive channel, so interoceptive control may be a fact about breathing rather than a general trait (Interoceptive control, Respiratory interoception).
- Moderately anxious people were less sensitive to inspiratory loads on the Filter Detection Task (FDT) (Harrison et al. (2021)).
What would answer it
- Compare panic disorder patients with matched controls on the Respiratory tracking task with visuomotor perturbation (respyra) under veridical, perturbed and hidden-feedback conditions, together with the Filter Detection Task (FDT) and anxiety sensitivity, and test group differences in veridical error, perturbation ratio and the hidden-feedback cost, plus whether control and detection relate within persons.
Connections
- Raised on: Interoceptive control, Respiratory tracking task with visuomotor perturbation (respyra), Allen (2026)
- Related concepts: Interoceptive control, Cognitive model of panic, Anxiety sensitivity, Respiratory interoception
- Related debates: Is interoception domain-general or organ-specific?, Is perceptual inference itself a genuine regulatory mode, or does the act of ‘choosing to let go’ collapse it back into active inference?
Allen (2026) supplied the first task that asks participants to do something to their body and scores how well they did it. Interoceptive control argues this fills a slot the field’s taxonomies have left empty since 2015, and lists panic as one of the first places it would matter: the question of whether panickers also control the breath differently has never been asked with an instrument.
The task has one problem that must be solved first. The tracking trace is shown on screen, and vision is fast and precise where interoception is slow and diffuse, so good tracking may reflect good visuomotor control. Respiratory tracking task with visuomotor perturbation (respyra) recommends describing it as respiratory motor control with interoceptive involvement assumed rather than shown until at least a no-feedback condition exists. A panic study that includes hidden-feedback trials would test the clinical question and the validity question in one design.
The result would also inform Does anxiety sharpen heartbeat detection but blunt breath detection?. If anxious people both detect respiratory loads less well and control breathing less well, the respiratory channel would carry a coherent clinical profile that cardiac counting data cannot represent.