Researcher at a glance
- Affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand; formerly Translational Neuromodeling Unit, University of Zurich / ETH Zurich, and Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford
- Orientation: Breathing as the tractable window onto interoception: building psychophysical and computational instruments for respiratory perception, metacognition and learning, and using them to ask how anxiety and respiratory disease attach to specific levels of the interoceptive hierarchy
Key contributions
- The Filter Detection Task (Harrison et al. 2021, Biological Psychology) — a portable breathing task yielding perceptual threshold, decision bias, metacognitive bias and metacognitive efficiency from one session; the instrument the wiki had been naming for three ingests.
- The Breathing Learning Task and [[harrison-2021-breathing-interoception-anxiety|Harrison et al. (2021, Neuron)]] — the first trial-by-trial computational model of interoceptive learning fitted to behaviour with concurrent 7T imaging, and the wiki’s first empirical test of interoceptive predictive coding in humans.
- The PAG respiratory work under her former name (Faull) — functional subdivision of the human periaqueductal gray in respiratory control (Faull et al. 2015), conditioned respiratory threat in its subdivisions (Faull et al. 2016), and the cortical connectivity of the PAG under threat of breathlessness (Faull & Pattinson 2017). This is the source of the wiki’s one anatomically-addressed anticipation-versus-experience dissociation.
- Co-author on the RRST (Nikolova, Harrison, … Allen 2022), the automated psychophysical successor to her own filter task.
- Asthma work dissociating symptoms from mood and their influence on interoception and attention (Harrison et al. 2021c) — the clinical arm of the same programme.
Key papers
Connections
Created under the load-bearing-figure convention used for Schandry, Katkin, Ehlers, Craske and Petzschner: her instruments were cited across four wiki pages before any of her papers were read here.
The name change, and why it matters for reading the wiki
She publishes as Faull through the Oxford PAG work (2015–2018) and as Harrison thereafter. The Respiratory interoception page’s respiratory-threat material (“Faull et al. 2015”) and the Periaqueductal gray (PAG) page’s anticipation/experience dissociation are hers; so is the FDT, the BLT, and the correspondence address on the 2021 Neuron paper (which is still faull@, and which reads as a strange discontinuity until you know). The wiki had been treating Faull and Harrison as two unrelated citations.
The programme
One channel, worked all the way up.
Most of the wiki’s interoception researchers are organized by a construct — Garfinkel by the taxonomy, Katkin by discrimination, Barrett by construction, Petzschner by the model. Harrison is organized by an organ, and the argument for that choice is methodological: breathing is the one interoceptive channel where a homeostatically real, aversive stimulus can be applied and withdrawn safely, repeatedly, and in graded amounts. That property is why she has instruments where other channels have questionnaires.
The [[harrison-2021-breathing-interoception-anxiety|2021 Neuron]] paper is the programme’s statement of itself: three levels of the same channel — belief, perception-plus-metacognition, trial-by-trial learning — measured in one sample, so that “which level does anxiety attach to?” becomes an answerable question rather than a framing. The answer she reports is not flattering to her own psychophysics: it is the questionnaires that carry the relationship, and the brain measure that carries least.
Placement
She is the wiki’s respiratory instrument-builder, standing to breathing roughly as Katkin and Schandry stand to the heart — with the difference that her instruments arrived after the field learned what was wrong with theirs, and are built to yield metacognitive parameters and model-based regressors rather than a single accuracy score.
Her position on the wiki’s live debates is mostly implicit in what she measures. Against domain generality she supplies the respiratory half of a growing asymmetry: anxiety goes with worse respiratory sensitivity where the cardiac literature has it going with better heartbeat detection. On inferential? she supplies the strongest human evidence the predictive side has — and, in the same paper, reports that the anterior/posterior prediction/error dissociation the theory predicts did not appear, which is the kind of result an instrument-builder reports and an advocate does not.
Held at one remove
The FDT methods paper, the RRST paper, the asthma paper and the whole Faull-era PAG series are known here only by citation; none are in raw/. So the wiki has her most ambitious study first-hand and her instruments secondhand, which is the reverse of the usual situation and worth remembering when Filter Detection Task (FDT) describes a staircase it has never read the validation for.