Respiratory Resistance Sensitivity Task (RRST)
Introduced by Nikolova et al. (2022), The respiratory resistance sensitivity task: An automated method for quantifying respiratory interoception and metacognition — the respiratory half of the Aarhus psychophysical battery. Met first-hand through Banellis et al. (2026); the methods paper is not in raw/.
Its place in the wiki’s respiratory story
respiratory-interoception has argued for several ingests that the field’s cardiac bottleneck has an under-used respiratory answer, and that the breath’s exceptional property — immediate voluntary drivability — makes it both the most tractable channel and the least representative one. Three respiratory instruments now sit on the wiki, and they carve that property differently:
| task | what the participant does | what drivability means here |
|---|---|---|
| RRST | passively judges which of two inhalations was harder | a nuisance — breathing strategy is uncontrolled variance |
| Filter Detection Task (Harrison et al. 2021) | detects added filter resistance | same, with coarser stimulus steps |
| respiratory-tracking-task | actively drives the breath to a target | the entire construct (interoceptive-control) |
The RRST is the perceptual member of that set: it treats the breath as a signal to be read, which is what makes it the right partner for the HRDT in a cross-modal comparison, and what makes the comparison a comparison of perception only.
What it bought
Two things the older respiratory literature could not supply.
A slope. Filter-based tasks add discrete physical filters, so the stimulus space is coarse and no reliable psychometric function can be fitted. Without a function there is no precision parameter — the quantity every computational account of interoception is actually about. The RRST’s motor-driven continuum makes it estimable.
A matched null. Because RRST and HRDT parameters come out of the same hierarchical Bayesian pipeline, a cross-modal correlation between them is not confounded with instrument type. That is the whole evidential force of the domain-generality null: earlier cross-modal work compared incommensurable scores, and this pairing does not.
One result worth keeping in view
Within the respiratory task, sensitivity and precision correlated at r(256) = 0.337 — participants needing a larger load to detect it were also more consistent around their threshold. Within the cardiac task, nothing correlated with anything (BF01 = 8.55 for the same pair).
The wiki should not over-read this, but it is a hint that the two tasks are not psychometrically equivalent instruments pointed at different organs. A coherent internal structure in one and none in the other is at least as consistent with “the cardiac task is noisy” as with “the cardiac system is disorganised” — and if the cardiac measurement is the weaker one, that is an alternative reading of the cross-modal null that Banellis et al. do not raise.