Method at a glance
- Modality: non-interoceptive (visual go/no-go) — used as a transfer outcome for interoceptive training
- Measures: Sustained attention and inhibitory control, indexed by failures to withhold a prepotent response to a rare target (commission errors); secondarily, the shape of the response-time distribution.
- Procedure: Digits 1-9 presented one at a time; respond to every digit except one infrequent target (e.g. 3), on which responding must be withheld. In Eusebio et al. (2022): 4 blocks x 260 trials (242 go, 18 no-go), 250 ms stimulus, ~1200 ms mean ISI. Accuracy = correct no-go trials / no-go trials.
- Also called: SART, Sustained Attention to Response Task, go/no-go sustained attention task
Strengths
- Commission errors are a validated correlate of mind-wandering frequency (Jackson & Balota 2012; McVay & Kane 2012) and of failed inhibition — a behavioural readout where contemplative research otherwise relies on questionnaires.
- Entirely unrelated in content to interoceptive or contemplative training, which makes an improvement on it a transfer effect rather than practice on the trained material. This is the property that makes it worth running at all.
- Yields a full RT distribution, not just an error count, so it supports ex-Gaussian decomposition and pre-/post-error RT analyses from the same data.
- Cheap, brief, repeatable across assessment waves without obvious learning artefacts on the inhibition component.
Limitations
- Measures errors of commission (failure to inhibit), not omission. How training affects the initiation of behaviour — arguably the more interesting contemplative question — requires a different paradigm, as Eusebio et al. note of their own design.
- It is not an interoceptive measure in any sense. Its use here is as a downstream outcome, so any interoceptive interpretation is an inference about mechanism, never a measurement of one.
- The prepotent-response design means accuracy can be raised simply by responding more slowly; a speed-accuracy shift and an attention improvement look alike unless RT is modelled alongside.
- In Eusebio et al. (2022), Movement-Focused participants appeared to plateau near ~60% accuracy — the authors speculate about a ceiling, but with N = 34 this is a reading of a figure, not an estimated asymptote.
Connections
- Key studies: Eusebio et al. (2022)
- Related methods: Ex-Gaussian decomposition of reaction times, Multidimensional Experience Sampling (MDES), Interoceptive attention task
Robertson, Manly, Andrade, Baddeley & Yiend (1997). A stream of digits arrives; you press for all of them except one rare target, on which you must do nothing. The task builds a habit of responding and then punishes it — commission errors are the measure.
Why an interoception wiki holds it
Because of what it isn’t. Nearly every outcome in this wiki’s contemplative literature is a questionnaire, and the standing worry across contemplative training increase objective interoceptive accuracy? and Is more interoceptive awareness better? is that self-reported improvement after a training that teaches you to value bodily awareness is partly the training teaching you to endorse items.
The SART cannot be endorsed. In Eusebio et al. (2022) it is the only measure in an eight-questionnaire battery that distinguished the two yoga arms, while the self-report measures moved equally in both. That inversion — behaviour differentiates, self-report does not — is the reason this page exists.
It is also why the transfer claim is load-bearing. There is no overlap between attending to sensations in a yoga posture and withholding a keypress to the digit 3, beyond the abstract demand to keep track of the present moment. Improvement therefore cannot be practice effects on the trained material, which is the standard deflation of cognitive-training results.
The three-level readout
The task supports progressively finer analysis of the same trials, and in Eusebio et al. the three levels dissociated — which is the useful methodological lesson:
| level | measure | what it indexes | Eusebio et al. result |
|---|---|---|---|
| errors | no-go accuracy | inhibitory control / lapse rate | group difference (p = .006) |
| distribution | tau | frequency of extreme-slow responses = lapses, mind-wandering | no group difference (ps > .110) |
| sequence | post-error RT change | post-error slowing; adaptive re-engagement or ruminative disruption | no group difference (ps > .24) |
Accuracy improved without tau falling. Whatever changed, it was not the frequency of attentional lapses — so the paradigm’s own mechanistic indices declined to explain its headline effect. A page recommending the SART should recommend all three levels precisely because they can come apart like this.
A design detail worth copying
Because the trial preceding a no-go trial may itself be the trial following an earlier no-go, pre-target RT baselines are contaminated by prior post-target effects. Eusebio et al. analysed only trials preceded by at least three correct go trials. Any pre-/post-error RT analysis on a SART needs an equivalent guard, and papers reporting post-error slowing without one should be read with that in mind.