Research gap at a glance
- Question: Can a report-free index of interoceptive sensitivity be validated against verbal accuracy tasks and then used reliably in infants, young children, non-speaking autistic people and people with dementia?
- Why it matters: The developmental claims about the social origins of interoception and the neurodegenerative end of the ageing curve both depend on populations that current tasks cannot measure. Until such a measure exists, the lifespan arc of interoception is sampled only where report is possible.
- Theme: Development and aging
- Status: open
What the wiki already knows
- The NIH review states there is no measure of interoceptive sensitivity suitable for non-verbal populations such as infants or older adults with dementia, and names objective, quantitative assessment as an outstanding question (Chen et al. (2021), Interoceptive taxonomy (Farb et al. Box 1)).
- Tsakiris describes the emergence of interoceptive awareness in early life as unexplored and blames limited-range measures for children; one neurobehavioural infant attempt (Maister et al. 2017) is cited (Quigley et al. (2021), Social origins of interoception).
- Reported Alzheimer’s impairments across accuracy, heartbeat-evoked potentials, learning and metacognition rely on tracking and confidence tasks, so the measured decline may come only from the still-verbal part of the disease course (Age-related interoceptive decline, Bonaz et al. (2021)).
- Every interoception study in autism reviewed by DuBois et al. excluded comorbid developmental disability, so the non-verbal majority of the spectrum is unmeasured (DuBois et al. (2016), Interoception in autism (ASD)).
What would answer it
- Take a candidate report-free index, such as the Heartbeat-evoked potential or a behavioural response to stimuli synchronous versus asynchronous with the heartbeat, validate it against discrimination-task accuracy in verbal adults, establish its reliability, and then apply it longitudinally from infancy and cross-sectionally across dementia stages and in non-speaking autistic people.
Connections
- Raised on: Chen et al. (2021), Interoceptive taxonomy (Farb et al. Box 1), Age-related interoceptive decline, Social origins of interoception, Interoception in autism (ASD)
- Related concepts: Social origins of interoception, Age-related interoceptive decline, Interoception in autism (ASD), Interoceptive taxonomy (Farb et al. Box 1)
- Related debates: Are the origins of interoception social or biological?, Is interoception domain-general or organ-specific?
Interoceptive taxonomy (Farb et al. Box 1) records four competing partitions of interoception and then notes what they share: every construct is operationalised as a verbal report of a counted or rated quantity. Chen et al. (2021) turn that into a lifespan diagnosis. The obstacle to studying how interoception develops and declines is not interest but instrumentation.
That single limitation explains why two of the wiki’s threads are thin at their ends. Social origins of interoception makes claims about how infants build a model of their own viscera through caregiving, and its originator calls the claim untested. Age-related interoceptive decline follows the curve into Alzheimer’s disease, where the reported deficits depend on exactly the kind of task Chen et al. say cannot be used. In autism, the same verbal bottleneck means the literature describes only verbal, typically male, normal-IQ samples.
The constructive step is validation before application. A report-free index has to be shown to track accuracy where accuracy can be measured before it can stand in for accuracy where it cannot. That also makes it a precondition for the longitudinal design proposed in Does early caregiving shape how children come to feel their bodies?.