Research gap at a glance
- Question: Do individual differences in cardiac, respiratory and other interoceptive sensitivity, uncorrelated at rest, become correlated under physiological challenge such as adrenergic infusion or exercise, in healthy and clinical samples?
- Why it matters: Transdiagnostic accounts assume a person can have poor interoception in general, yet resting data show no such person-level ability. If a shared factor emerges only under perturbation, domain generality survives as a state-dependent property and clinical testing should move to challenge protocols; if not, interoceptive claims must be made channel by channel.
- Theme: Mechanism
- Status: open
What the wiki already knows
- Cardiac and respiratory sensitivity, precision and metacognitive efficiency were uncorrelated in 241 healthy adults at rest; the authors name arousal or stress as the leading untested route to domain generality (Banellis et al. (2026)).
- Earlier multichannel work covered more channels with weaker instruments, and the anatomical review warns that perceptual sensitivity for one signal may not generalise to others (Ferentzi et al. (2018), Berntson & Khalsa (2021)).
- Khalsa’s isoproterenol programme rests on the premise that interoceptive differences show when the body is perturbed, and the field roadmap bets that clinically useful measures will be perturbation probes rather than resting tasks (Sahib S. Khalsa, Interoceptive psychopathology).
- When two channels were both aversively perturbed, anticipation-experience discrepancy correlated at r = 0.57, a consistency with the perturbation escape rather than a test of it (Wilzok et al. (2023), Is interoception domain-general or organ-specific?).
- A meta-analysis found one convergent site of disrupted activation (left dorsal mid-insula) across disorders and channels, but site convergence does not imply a shared ability (Nord et al. (2021)).
What would answer it
- One sample, one battery, rest versus challenge: administer the Heart Rate Discrimination Task (HRDT) and Respiratory Resistance Sensitivity Task (RRST) (and a gastric task if one is built) at rest and under isoproterenol infusion or graded exercise, in healthy adults and a patient group, and test whether the cross-channel correlation of sensitivity rises under challenge while the measures themselves are held fixed.
Connections
- Raised on: Is interoception domain-general or organ-specific?, Banellis et al. (2026), Interoceptive psychopathology, Accuracy of Interoceptive Anticipation and Interoceptive Discrepancy paradigms
- Related concepts: Interoceptive sensitivity, Interoceptive precision, Interoceptive psychopathology, Respiratory interoception
- Related debates: Is interoception domain-general or organ-specific?, Is the heartbeat-counting task a valid measure of cardiac perception?
Is interoception domain-general or organ-specific? is the wiki’s clearest case of a question that has a ranked list of escapes and a single experiment that would test the strongest one. The null results are all from healthy, mostly young adults at rest. Predictive accounts hold that interoceptive prediction errors matter most when the body is pushed off its set-point, so a common factor could exist and be invisible in a resting laboratory.
The debate page puts it directly: the experiment is now cheaper to specify than it was, one sample, one battery, rest versus challenge. Its clinical twin appears on Interoceptive psychopathology, which notes that the transdiagnostic frame presupposes a patient-level property that has been tested only in healthy people at rest, and that the same multichannel battery in a patient sample under challenge has not been run.
Two cautions shape the design. The perturbation must vary arousal while holding the task fixed, otherwise any rise in correlation is confounded with a change in instrument. And the channels need comparable psychophysics: if the gastric axis is wanted it depends on the measure proposed in Can gastric interoceptive accuracy be measured with modern psychophysics?, and if anxiety is the clinical group the result bears directly on Does anxiety sharpen heartbeat detection but blunt breath detection?.