Research gap at a glance
- Question: Do confidence ratings and anticipation-experience discrepancy scores correlate across interoceptive channels because of a shared interoceptive capacity, or because of a general rating style that would correlate just as strongly with matched exteroceptive tasks?
- Why it matters: These are the only interoceptive quantities that have so far shown cross-channel coherence, so they are the strongest remaining evidence for a person-level interoceptive trait. If they are scale use, the domain-general case loses its last support and discrepancy-based clinical accounts lose their instrument.
- Theme: Measurement
- Status: open
What the wiki already knows
- Cardiac and respiratory sensitivity, precision and metacognitive efficiency were uncorrelated at N = 241, while mean confidence correlated across cardiac, respiratory and auditory tasks, with the auditory correlation the largest (Banellis et al. (2026)).
- Induced anticipation-experience discrepancy correlated at r = 0.57 across inspiratory loading and pinprick pain in 52 people and retested well (ICC 0.78 respiratory, 0.54 to 0.66 nociceptive), but the battery had no exteroceptive comparison (Wilzok et al. (2023), Discrepancy awareness).
- Across studies, self-report magnitudes travel across channels and psychophysical thresholds do not (Is interoception domain-general or organ-specific?).
- The anticipation paradigms were built for clinical use but have never been run in a clinical sample, and their relation to self-reported sensibility was collected but not reported (Accuracy of Interoceptive Anticipation and Interoceptive Discrepancy paradigms).
What would answer it
- Add a visual or auditory expectation-violation condition, matched in structure to the Accuracy of Interoceptive Anticipation and Interoceptive Discrepancy paradigms, to the same participants, together with confidence ratings on interoceptive and exteroceptive detection tasks; model rating-scale use explicitly and test whether interoceptive discrepancy and confidence correlate more with each other than with their exteroceptive counterparts, first in healthy adults and then in an anxiety sample.
Connections
- Raised on: Discrepancy awareness, Accuracy of Interoceptive Anticipation and Interoceptive Discrepancy paradigms, Is interoception domain-general or organ-specific?, Banellis et al. (2026)
- Related concepts: Discrepancy awareness, Metacognitive efficiency and metacognitive bias, Interoceptive precision, Interoceptive trait prediction error (ITPE)
- Related debates: Is interoception domain-general or organ-specific?
Discrepancy awareness makes a pointed observation about the gap between what a person expected to feel and what they report feeling. It is reliable and it correlates across channels, which is exactly the profile the wiki has otherwise seen only in confidence. Banellis et al. (2026) concluded that confidence was a fact about response style rather than the body, and they could do so because their battery included an auditory task whose confidence correlation turned out to be the largest.
Wilzok et al. (2023) had no such comparison. A participant with a consistent anchoring habit, or one who uses the scale differently before and after a painful event, will produce correlated discrepancies across any two channels with no shared bodily machinery. The discrepancy page states the test and notes nobody has done it.
The stakes reach beyond measurement. Is interoception domain-general or organ-specific? treats the r = 0.57 discrepancy correlation as the one datum pointing towards domain generality under perturbation, and the clinical accounts of Martin P. Paulus locate anxiety and depression in a failure to anticipate interoceptive states. Both inherit whatever the exteroceptive control shows.