Research gap at a glance
- Question: Does regular physical activity, manipulated experimentally, change objective interoceptive accuracy measured at rest, and can any change be separated from the larger cardiac signal that exercise produces?
- Why it matters: Physical activity is proposed as a cheap public-health route to better interoception, but every finding so far is self-report. If accuracy does not change, or changes only because the heart is louder, the claim reduces to an effect on attention or salience.
- Theme: Intervention
- Status: open
What the wiki already knows
- Momentary physical activity raised self-reported interoception while habitual weekly activity lowered it, in one multilevel model of 70 people sampled ten times a day (Wallman-Jones et al. (2023), Physical activity, sedentary behaviour and interoception).
- Everything measured in this literature is self-report; the accuracy version of the exercise claim has not been tested in daily life (Physical activity, sedentary behaviour and interoception, Amie Wallman-Jones).
- Exercise above about 100 bpm produces accurate heartbeat perceivers who disappear by about 95 bpm, which the wiki elsewhere files as a cardiodynamic confound rather than a benefit (Does et al. (2000)).
- Salience (louder signals during exertion) and attention (goal-directed focus on the body) are confounded in the existing data, and the athlete insula finding has been cited for opposite conclusions (Physical activity, sedentary behaviour and interoception).
- In a randomised digital mindfulness trial, self-reported awareness rose but was uncorrelated with the endurance gain (r = -0.02), which tracked distress tolerance instead (Rai et al. (2026)).
What would answer it
- Randomise inactive adults to a supervised exercise programme or an attention-matched sedentary control for several weeks, and measure resting heartbeat discrimination and a respiratory threshold before and after, with heart rate and stroke volume recorded, plus testing at matched heart rates to separate a change in the perceiver from a change in the signal.
Connections
- Raised on: Physical activity, sedentary behaviour and interoception, Amie Wallman-Jones, Wallman-Jones et al. (2023), Rai et al. (2026)
- Related concepts: Physical activity, sedentary behaviour and interoception, Interoceptive exposure, Distress tolerance, State vs trait interoception
- Related debates: Is more interoceptive awareness better?, Is the heartbeat-counting task a valid measure of cardiac perception?, contemplative training increase objective interoceptive accuracy?
Physical activity, sedentary behaviour and interoception treats the exercise literature as a late arrival that touches several of the wiki’s oldest disputes. Its strong claim is that everyday behaviour modulates interoception, upward with movement and downward with screens. Its evidence is self-report, and Wallman-Jones herself notes that the strong version, behaviour changing accuracy in daily life, has not been tested.
The page also holds a tension that a trial would have to confront. The same phenomenon, exercise making heartbeats easier to count, is filed as a confound on the heartbeat-task pages and as a benefit in the exercise literature. Both readings cannot be right without a criterion for when a louder signal is better perception, and nobody has offered one. Recording stroke volume and testing at matched heart rates is the most direct way to separate them (see Does cardiac signal strength explain what heartbeat tasks seem to measure?).
The parallel with contemplative training is instructive. Mindfulness also promised to raise interoceptive contact and delivered on attention and self-report rather than accuracy (Does interoceptively focused training raise objective accuracy under randomisation?). The one interventional result in the exercise thread, Rai et al. (2026), points the same way: the exercise-relevant variable may be what a person can tolerate of a bodily signal rather than how much they notice it.