Researcher at a glance
- Affiliation: Institute of Sport Science, University of Bern (at the time of the 2023 paper); subsequently University of California, San Francisco
- Orientation: Sport and exercise science applied to interoception. Holds that physical activity acts as a naturally occurring form of interoceptive exposure — acutely raising signal salience and directing attention to the body, chronically training the brain–body pathway — and that sedentary, particularly screen-based, behaviour leaves that pathway untrained.
Key contributions
- Authored the field’s programmatic statement of the physical-activity/interoception link (Wallman-Jones, Perakakis, Tsakiris & Schmidt 2021), including the ‘untrained interoceptive pathway’ account of sedentary behaviour that the wiki holds at one remove on Physical activity, sedentary behaviour and interoception.
- Took the question out of the laboratory: the first ambulatory-assessment study of interoception and everyday behaviour, and with it the wiki’s first estimate of how much of interoception is a state rather than a trait (ICC = 0.51).
- Reported, in both a laboratory study (Wallman-Jones et al. 2022) and the daily-life study, that people with higher baseline interoceptive accuracy gain least (or lose) from acute physical activity — the habituation/ceiling pattern.
Key papers
Connections
- Debates: Is more interoceptive awareness better?
- Related researchers: Manos Tsakiris, Sahib S. Khalsa, Sarah N. Garfinkel
The wiki’s only source on exercise and interoception, and the reason Physical activity, sedentary behaviour and interoception exists as a page.
Her line of work is unusual in this wiki’s company: it arrives from sport science rather than from psychiatry, neuroscience or contemplative practice, and it treats interoception as something ordinary behaviour modulates on a fifteen-minute timescale rather than as a stable individual difference to correlate against outcomes. That framing is what produced the State vs trait interoception finding almost incidentally — the paper set out to ask whether exercise raises bodily awareness and returned an estimate of how much of the construct is a moment rather than a person.
Why this page exists despite one paper in raw/. The wiki’s convention is that co-authors and single-appearance first authors do not get pages (Nentjes is the precedent for withholding one). This is a deliberate exception on the same grounds as Rainer Schandry and Edward Katkin: the two concept pages created with this ingest rest substantially on a theoretical review and a laboratory study of hers that are not in raw/ and are therefore known only by citation, and a page is the honest place to record that dependency rather than leaving it distributed across prose. Held accordingly — nothing on this page is read first-hand except the 2023 study.
Positions worth holding against the rest of the wiki
Physical activity as interoceptive exposure. If sound, this makes the deliberate Interoceptive exposure of clinical practice and incidental exercise the same intervention, which no literature on either side has taken seriously. It also makes exercise the cheapest interoceptive intervention proposed anywhere, and it is essentially absent from the field’s consensus roadmap.
The habituation account. Her explanation for why habitually active people report less interoceptive contact — familiar signals recruit less attention — is the same structure as the meditator anomaly arriving from a different direction, and it is in tension with her own training claim. Whether attenuation is efficiency or decay is the open question her work poses and does not answer.
Everything so far is self-report. Her daily-life dependent variable is a mindfulness questionnaire; the accuracy measure appears only as a baseline covariate. The strong version of her claim — that behaviour changes interoceptive accuracy in daily life — has not been tested by anyone, and she says so.