Interoception Wiki

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Research gaps

1 min read

The open empirical questions this wiki keeps running into: places where the studies stop short, disagree, or were never run. Each gap has its own page with what is already known, which pages raise it, and a sketch of a study that would answer it.

Vote for the gaps you think matter most. Sign in with your RADlab account (the same one you use on radlab.zone). You get one vote per gap and can take it back at any time. The list is ordered by votes, so it doubles as the lab’s priority list.

Think something is missing? Suggest a gap or a paper. For places where sources disagree rather than fall silent, see the contradictions register.

  1. Can body-focused treatment shift the stable sensory marker of depressive relapse?

    In people recovered from depression, does an intervention that targets bodily and sensory representation directly reduce somatosensory deactivation under dysphoria, a marker that cognitive prophylactic therapies leave unchanged, and does that reduction lower relapse?

    InterventionOpen

  2. Can gastric interoceptive accuracy be measured with modern psychophysics?

    Can a gastric perception task with a physically specified stimulus and a known correct answer yield a reliable individual accuracy score, comparable to existing cardiac and respiratory tasks?

    MeasurementOpen

  3. Can people's forecasts of how their bodily state will evolve be measured?

    Can a human paradigm measure predictions about how an internal bodily state will change under its own dynamics, as opposed to predictions that a cue signals an experimenter-imposed stimulus, and do such forecasts differ in anxiety or depression?

    MechanismOpen

  4. Can report-physiology mismatch identify who benefits from interoceptive training?

    In panic disorder, do patients who report cardiac symptoms without a measured heart-rate increase benefit more from interoceptive training than patients whose reports match their physiology?

    InterventionOpen

  5. Do bodily emotion maps record bodily states or shared emotion concepts?

    Are the cross-culturally concordant bodily sensation maps of emotion produced by shared bodily experience, or by shared emotion concepts cued by emotion words and carried across languages?

    Emotion and selfOpen

  6. Do cross-channel interoceptive self-reports reflect the body or response style?

    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?

    MeasurementOpen

  7. Do people with panic disorder control their breathing differently?

    Do people with panic disorder show worse respiratory tracking, or a larger cost when the mapping between breath and feedback is perturbed, and does any difference persist when visual feedback is removed?

    ClinicalOpen

  8. Do posterior insula lesions make body-ownership illusions weaker or stronger?

    Are patients with focal posterior insula lesions more or less susceptible to the rubber hand illusion than patients with lesions elsewhere and healthy controls?

    Emotion and selfOpen

  9. Does a general interoceptive ability appear when the body is perturbed?

    Do individual differences in cardiac, respiratory and other interoceptive sensitivity, uncorrelated at rest, become correlated under physiological challenge such as adrenergic infusion or exercise, in healthy and clinical samples?

    MechanismOpen

  10. Does acutely removing bodily feedback impair decisions under ambiguity?

    Does acute blockade of peripheral autonomic feedback in healthy people, or focal insula damage studied with bodily measures, degrade decision-making under ambiguity, and if so through loss of the bodily signal, loss of its perception, or something unrelated to the body?

    Emotion and selfOpen

  11. Does anxiety sharpen heartbeat detection but blunt breath detection?

    Within one anxiety-selected sample, does anxiety predict better cardiac and worse respiratory interoceptive sensitivity, or does the apparent reversal disappear when both channels are measured with comparable psychophysical tasks?

    ClinicalOpen

  12. Does better heartbeat perception intensify felt emotion, or only amplify the body's signal?

    In one unselected sample, does interoceptive accuracy predict felt arousal as a main effect, only as a moderator of the bodily response, or both?

    Emotion and selfOpen

  13. Does cardiac signal strength explain what heartbeat tasks seem to measure?

    When stroke volume is measured and statistically controlled, do heartbeat-task scores still predict the outcomes, age effects and questionnaire scores that are attributed to interoceptive accuracy?

    MeasurementOpen

  14. Does completing an interrupted defensive movement resolve trauma better than other movement?

    In people with trauma-related symptoms, does slowly completing the specific defensive movement that was thwarted outperform generic vigorous movement of the same muscles and re-exposure that does not complete a motor act, including on long-term return of fear?

    InterventionOpen

  15. Does early caregiving shape how children come to feel their bodies?

    Does the quality of early caregiving prospectively predict children's later interoception, and does it affect the felt signal itself or only the child's trust in and report of it?

    Development and agingOpen

  16. Does gastric-brain coupling relate to anything a person feels?

    Does an individual's strength of gastric-brain coupling predict their gastric percepts, feelings, spontaneous body-directed thought or questionnaire reports, and do those reports change when coupling is manipulated?

    MechanismOpen

  17. Does interoception decline with age because the signal fades or because perception does?

    Is the age-related decline in heartbeat detection explained by weaker cardiac signals or by poorer perception, and does that decline account for age changes in felt emotion and in body-guided decisions?

    Development and agingOpen

  18. Does interoceptive accuracy really moderate how bodily signals guide decisions?

    Does the interaction between interoceptive accuracy and anticipatory bodily differentiation in predicting decision quality replicate in an independent, larger sample, and does it hold on the Iowa Gambling Task as well as on the intuitive reasoning task?

    Emotion and selfOpen

  19. Does interoceptively focused training raise objective accuracy under randomisation?

    When a training that emphasises attention to the body is randomised against an active comparator matched on everything but that emphasis, does it improve objective interoceptive accuracy or control, and in which channels?

    InterventionOpen

  20. Does physical activity change objective interoceptive accuracy, not just self-report?

    Does regular physical activity, manipulated experimentally, change objective interoceptive accuracy measured at rest, and can any change be separated from the larger cardiac signal that exercise produces?

    InterventionOpen

  21. Does the interoceptive trait prediction error hold when sensibility is low?

    In autistic and non-autistic people whose self-reported interoceptive sensibility is low rather than high, does the discrepancy between objective accuracy and sensibility still predict anxiety, and is it the signed or the absolute discrepancy that matters?

    ClinicalOpen

  22. How can interoception be measured in people who cannot report it verbally?

    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?

    Development and agingOpen

  23. How do interoceptive signals travel from the human brainstem to cortex?

    What are the multisynaptic routes by which organ signals pass through the nucleus of the solitary tract and parabrachial nucleus to cortex in humans, given that human data cover cortex well and animal data cover the body-to-brainstem stage well?

    Anatomy and physiologyOpen

  24. How much of interoceptive accuracy is a passing state rather than a stable trait?

    When objective interoceptive accuracy is measured repeatedly within the same people over days, what share of its variance lies within rather than between persons, and does that share differ from believed accuracy and from bodily attention?

    MeasurementOpen

  25. Is alexithymia a deficit in perceiving the body or in beliefs about it?

    When interoception is measured with tasks that avoid the counting confounds, does alexithymia predict poorer interoceptive performance, lower believed interoceptive accuracy, or only the gap between the two?

    Emotion and selfOpen

  26. Is gastric-brain coupling unreliable because recordings are short, or because it is a state?

    Does the test-retest reliability of individual gastric-brain phase coupling rise as recording length increases, or does it stay near zero however long the recording, while tracking manipulable states such as hunger?

    MeasurementOpen

  27. Is heartbeat-counting performance a continuum or a mixture of two groups?

    In a large unselected sample, is the distribution of heartbeat-counting error scores a single continuum, or a mixture of a small minority of genuine perceivers and a majority whose counts are driven by something other than cardiac perception?

    MeasurementOpen

  28. Is interoceptive dysfunction a cause or a consequence of mental illness?

    Do interoceptive differences measured before onset predict later anxiety, depression, eating disorders or related conditions, or do they appear only after symptoms begin?

    ClinicalOpen

  29. Is interoceptive dysfunction in mental illness specific to interoception?

    When interoceptive and exteroceptive sensitivity, over-responsivity and threat-related attention are measured with matched tasks in the same people, does interoceptive dysfunction predict psychopathology beyond a general sensory-precision or threat-attention factor?

    ClinicalOpen

  30. What shape is the relationship between interoceptive contact and wellbeing?

    Within one sample spanning clinical and non-clinical ranges, is the relationship between interoceptive contact and wellbeing curvilinear, absent as a main effect, or conditional on whether the person's bodily signals are informative?

    Emotion and selfOpen

Graph View

  • Studies
  • Concepts
  • Methods
  • Debates
  • Gaps
  • Researchers, other
  • Studies
  • Concepts
  • Methods
  • Debates
  • Gaps
  • Researchers, other

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