Is interoception domain-general or organ-specific?
Created with the Banellis et al. (2026) ingest, and overdue in the same way is-the-heartbeat-counting-task-valid was overdue: the material had been accumulating for six ingests — Ferentzi on interoceptive-taxonomy, the “scarce and inconsistent” line on quadt-2018-interoception-health-disease, the exceptionality argument on respiratory-interoception, the pending-question note on interoceptive-control — without the fight being named.
Why it is the more damaging of the wiki’s two measurement debates
is-the-heartbeat-counting-task-valid asks whether one instrument works. This asks whether the construct travels. They are independent, and the second is worse for this wiki, because a bad instrument can be replaced while a non-existent general construct cannot.
Consider what the wiki routinely does. Dunn measures cardiac counting accuracy and concludes about intuitive decision-making. Wiens measures cardiac discrimination and concludes about emotional intensity. Nentjes measures cardiac discrimination and concludes about psychopathy. Khalsa measures cardiac discrimination and concludes that interoception declines with age. Each conclusion is stated about interoception; each measurement is about a heart. If the axes are independent, every one of those inferences needs its scope narrowed, and the is-more-interoceptive-awareness-better collision table — which lines up findings from different labs, disorders and outcomes as though they were measurements of one quantity — is comparing quantities that have been shown not to covary.
What is agreed
- First-order performance does not travel. Nobody in this debate now claims cardiac accuracy predicts respiratory accuracy. Even Garfinkel et al. (2016), the domain-generality anchor, reported first-order performance as unrelated across the axes; their claim was always about the metacognitive layer.
- Something does travel: confidence. Both camps find it. The dispute is over what it is.
- The instruments were incommensurable until recently. Comparing a counting score to a filter-detection score confounds modality with method. The HRDT/RRST pair is the first matched instrumentation, which is why the 2026 null carries more than the earlier ones.
The crux: what is the domain-general confidence signal?
This is where the debate now actually lives, and both readings fit the data.
| Confidence as interoceptive sensibility | Confidence as general metacognitive bias | |
|---|---|---|
| What the cardiac↔respiratory r = 0.51 shows | A real shared interoceptive layer — the person’s relationship to their body as a whole, above the organ-specific perceptual machinery | A response-scale disposition with no bodily content |
| What the respiratory↔auditory r = 0.64 shows | An embarrassment: the largest correlation involves a task with no body in it | Exactly what is predicted; audition is not special, nothing is |
| Consequence for maia and questionnaire measures | They measure the general interoceptive layer, and their failure to predict accuracy is expected | They measure a trait that is not interoceptive at all, and calling it interoceptive sensibility is a category error |
The auditory correlation being the largest is the strongest single fact in this debate and it favours the right-hand column. A shared interoceptive layer should not bind more tightly to tones than to breath.
The wiki’s caution against overreading it: mean confidence on any two VAS-rated forced-choice tasks will correlate partly through scale use, and no study here decomposes that. “Confidence is domain-general” and “confidence ratings share method variance” predict the same matrix.
The escapes, ranked
- Arousal / perturbation (strongest). All the null evidence is from resting healthy participants. Predictive accounts hold that interoceptive prediction errors matter most when the body is perturbed; a common central factor could exist and be invisible at rest. sahib-khalsa’s isoproterenol programme is built on this premise, and the Banellis authors endorse the test. This is the discriminating experiment the debate needs and does not have.
- Development and pathology. All the samples are healthy young adults. A general factor could be present in a clinical population, or in childhood before channel-specific expertise diverges — though Chen et al. note there is no instrument for non-verbal populations, so the developmental version may be untestable with current tools.
- Precision-weighting (Garfinkel’s). Channels may be differentially weighted rather than differentially able, so a person could be perceptually competent everywhere and behaviourally sensitive only where weight is assigned. This predicts decorrelated task performance with a shared underlying capacity — i.e. it is compatible with every null on this page while preserving a general mechanism. Elegant, and hard to falsify.
- Task asymmetry (weakest but unresolved). HRDT is multisensory, RRST unimodal. Fixable, and the authors say how.
What would resolve it
- The same battery under pharmacological or exertional challenge. If cardiac and respiratory sensitivity correlate under isoproterenol or exercise and not at rest, domain generality survives as a state-dependent property, which is a more interesting claim than the one being defended.
- Three or more channels in one sample with matched psychophysics. Ferentzi covered breadth with weak instruments; Banellis covered instruments with two channels. Gastric is the notable absence, since it is where coherence was originally claimed — and Levakov et al. (2023) complicates the obvious way of filling it. The gastric channel’s best-developed measure is a coupling quantity (gastric-network phase synchrony), which has no test–retest reliability in individuals; the reliable gastric measurement is the EGG signal itself, which is physiology and not perception. So gastric cannot currently enter this debate as a third psychophysical axis at all. Someone would first have to build a gastric detection task with modern psychophysics, and the last serious attempts date to the 1980s.
- Decomposing the confidence correlation. Does cross-modal confidence still bind after scale-use variance is modelled out? A generative model of interoceptive metacognition is the authors’ own proposal.
- A control-side test. Whether interoceptive-control is channel-specific is entirely unknown, and cannot be inferred from these perceptual nulls. There is currently only one channel with a control task (respiratory-tracking-task), so this question may be unaskable for some time.
Why open rather than resolved
Because the null is moderate rather than decisive, because it is confined to two channels at rest in one demographic, and because the most plausible defence of domain generality — that it appears only under perturbation — is not merely unrefuted but untested. What is resolved is narrower and still consequential: there is no demonstrated person-level interoceptive ability, and claims of the form “X has poor interoception” are, on present evidence, claims about an organ.