Interoceptive taxonomy (Farb et al. Box 1)

Proposed in Farb et al. (2015), Box 1, following Garfinkel & Critchley (2013). Motivation: treating interoception as a single construct produces spurious inferences — e.g., meditators’ strong interoceptive attention tendencies do not predict superior heartbeat-detection accuracy (Khalsa et al. 2008; Parkin et al. 2013), a finding that only makes sense once attention and accuracy are separated. See does-mindfulness-enhance-interoceptive-accuracy.

The seven constructs

• Awareness — the most common measure (e.g., sense of one’s heart beating), usually operationalized as reportability; limited because interoceptive processes can operate implicitly (e.g., thermoregulatory shivering during sleep).
• Coherence — degree to which objectively observable interoceptive signals manifest in reportable experience (e.g., hypoglycemia can promote irritability without awareness of low blood sugar). Varies widely between individuals.
• Attention tendency — whether a person habitually attends to particular interoceptive signals (or to interoceptive vs. exteroceptive information generally).
• Sensitivity — the minimum threshold for detecting interoceptive signal change; may operate at multiple representational levels culminating in conscious access. Its signal-detection-theory counterpart, specificity, is rarely used in interoception research.
• Accuracy — ability to reliably discriminate interoceptive signals from noise/competing signals and between intensity levels; the most commonly investigated measure (usually via the heartbeat-detection-task); a function of sensitivity and specificity; improvable with training.
• Sensibility — an individual’s personal account of their internal-sensation experience, including confidence in their own interoceptive ability and feelings of engagement; gauged via interview/questionnaire (e.g., Porges Body Perception Questionnaire — though its interoceptive validity is questioned since it may largely index anxiety; also the Scale of Body Connection and the MAIA).
• Regulation — how well a person matches an interoceptive signal to a desired state, whether via reappraisal/suppression/distraction (shaping the signal) or contemplative acceptance/curious examination (shaping the relationship to the signal, without necessarily changing it).

Terminological tension with Garfinkel et al. (2015)

Garfinkel et al. (2015) combine sensitivity and accuracy into a single interoceptive accuracy (objective task performance), and define interoceptive awareness as “metacognitive awareness of interoceptive accuracy, e.g., confidence–accuracy correspondence.” Farb et al. explicitly push back on this: “metacognitive awareness” already has an established, different meaning in contemplative practice — the capacity to take awareness/thought itself as an object of attention (per Smallwood & Schooler 2006; Herbert & Forman 2011). To avoid conflating these, Farb et al. propose the term coherence for confidence–accuracy correspondence instead, reserving “metacognitive awareness” for its contemplative sense. This is a genuine, acknowledged terminology conflict between near-contemporaneous papers, not a simple restatement — see the note on interoceptive-sensitivity.