Respiratory tracking task with visuomotor perturbation (respyra)
Introduced with the Allen (2026) ingest. Structurally the odd one out among this wiki’s methods, and worth stating why plainly.
What kind of measure this is
Every other measurement method here asks the participant to detect, discriminate, rate or report. Count your heartbeats (heartbeat-detection-task). Say how much you notice your body (maia). Colour where you feel it (embody). Rate how strongly a property comes to mind (property-association-task).
This one asks them to do something to their body and scores how well they did it. The dependent variable is a physical error signal against a known target, sampled ten times a second, with no report anywhere in the causal chain. That is a genuinely different measurement relation, and it is the source of both the method’s advantage and its central unresolved problem — see interoceptive-control.
The two scores
| Score | What it is | Reads as |
|---|---|---|
| Veridical MAE (g = 1.0) | mean absolute deviation between target and breathing trace | baseline respiratory control ability |
| Perturbation ratio (perturbed MAE / veridical MAE) | cost of the distorted mapping, normalized | sensorimotor flexibility / remapping cost |
The pairing is the design’s point. Allen’s worked example: low veridical MAE with a low ratio means good control and good flexibility; high veridical MAE with a low ratio means poor control but intact adaptability. Raw performance alone cannot distinguish these, and in the validation data the two came apart — accumulating fatigue degraded the ratio across sessions while veridical tracking stayed flat.
RMSE/MAE ratio is the third number and the least obvious one. Above √(π/2) ≈ 1.253 means heavy-tailed error: intermittent large deviations rather than uniformly larger error. It distinguishes “harder” from “unstable,” and it is what caught the inspiration/expiration asymmetry.
The exteroceptive problem
The honest limitation, stated once here and once on the study page because it governs how far anything measured with this task can be pushed:
The participant is watching a screen. The screen shows their breathing. They correct toward the target. Nothing in that loop requires them to feel their breathing at all — the visual channel is sufficient in principle, and vision is fast and precise where interoception is slow and diffuse. A tracking score is therefore an interoceptive measure by substrate (it is the respiratory system being controlled) and not necessarily by information (the control signal may be entirely visual).
Designs that would bear on this, none of them run:
- Remove or degrade the feedback. Track the target with the trace hidden after countdown. Performance under no-feedback is closed-loop on interoception alone, and the veridical-minus-blind difference is the visual contribution.
- Correlate against respiratory perceptual sensitivity (Respiratory Resistance Sensitivity Task, Nikolova et al. 2022; Filter Detection Task, Harrison et al. 2021). This is Allen’s own proposal. It establishes covariation between perceiving and controlling the breath, not that perception is doing work in the task.
- Perturb the afference rather than the display — inspiratory resistive loading during tracking — so the mapping distortion is interoceptive rather than visual.
Until at least the first of these exists, the wiki should describe this as a task measuring respiratory motor control with interoceptive involvement assumed, not demonstrated.
Where it would earn its keep
- Panic and hyperventilation. cognitive-model-of-panic and anxiety-sensitivity are entirely about the reading of respiratory sensation. Whether panic patients also control the breath abnormally — worse baseline tracking, or a higher remapping cost — is a question no instrument in this wiki could previously ask.
- Intervention fidelity. slow-breathing is prescribed at ~5-6 breaths/min and the wiki has no way to verify anyone complied. This measures compliance continuously, which turns a fixed-dose assumption into a measured covariate.
- Contemplative training. does-mindfulness-enhance-interoceptive-accuracy has repeatedly come out null for cardiac accuracy while trainees insist something changed. Control is an untested alternative dependent variable, and one that breath-focused practice plausibly trains directly.
- The regulation slot. interoceptive-taxonomy’s four competing nomenclatures agree on almost nothing except that regulation belongs on the list. None of them measure it.