The Body in the Mind: On the Relationship Between Interoception and Embodiment

Study at a glance

• Authors: Beate M. Herbert, Olga Pollatos
• Year: 2012
• Journal: Topics in Cognitive Science
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1756-8765.2012.01189.x
• Design: Theoretical review / overview

Key findings

• Frames interoception — the processing, representation and perception of bodily signals — as the bodily basis of embodiment, joining the emotion-and-interoception literature to embodied-cognition theory (higher cognition operates on reactivations of sensory-motor states; Niedenthal 2007, Barsalou lineage).
• Individual differences in interoceptive awareness (IA), operationalized as cardiac awareness via heartbeat-perception tasks, are presented as the trait linking interoception to emotional intensity, decision making, and attention — the authors’ own programme supplying much of the evidence.
• Adopts Craig’s posterior-to-anterior insular progression (their Fig. 1, adapted from Craig 2009a): raw visceral signals project to posterior insula and are progressively integrated with contextual/motivational/hedonic information toward the anterior insula, culminating in the ‘global emotional moment’ / sentient self.
• Proposes a ‘translation’ framework for psychopathology: alexithymia and eating disorders (esp. anorexia nervosa) are read as disturbances of embodiment — a difficulty translating bodily/interoceptive signals into conscious subjective feeling and self-awareness (Fuchs & Schlimme’s Leib/Körper distinction).
• Reports (by citation to the authors’ own work) that high alexithymia is associated with low IA on a heartbeat-perception task (Herbert et al. 2010a), and that anorexia patients show reduced perception of bodily signals including heartbeat (Pollatos et al. 2008).
• Extends the interoception–insula account to time perception: subjective duration may be built from accumulated interoceptive/emotional moments in posterior insula (Craig 2009a; Wittmann 2009; Wittmann et al. 2010).

Limitations

• A narrative review, not new data — every empirical claim is carried by citation, and most of its primary sources (Craig, Damasio, Tsakiris, the authors’ own heartbeat studies) the wiki holds first-hand from better-controlled reports.
• Uses ‘interoceptive awareness’/‘IA’ as a single trait, predating and eliding the accuracy/sensibility/awareness distinctions (Garfinkel 2015) the wiki’s taxonomy pages insist on.
• Concedes its own core evidential weakness: most interoception–cognition/emotion findings are correlational, so whether interoception is causally involved is unresolved; the authors call for experimental manipulation.
• Inherits the Munich programme’s standing confound — heartbeat-perception scores partly index cardiodynamics (stroke volume; Schandry et al. 1993), so ‘IA’ need not be perceptual skill (see Interoceptive sensitivity).

Connections

• Methods: Heartbeat detection task
• Concepts: Interoception, Interoceptive sensitivity, Embodied selfhood, Alexithymia, Insular cortex, Global emotional moment (Craig’s model of awareness), Somatic marker hypothesis, Experience of body ownership (EBO)
• Debates: Is more interoceptive awareness better?, inferential?
• Related studies: Craig (2009), Pollatos et al. (2005), Pollatos et al. (2007), Seth (2013), Quadt et al. (2018), Ventura-Bort et al. (2021)

A 2012 Topics in Cognitive Science review by Beate M. Herbert (Tübingen) and Olga Pollatos (Potsdam) arguing that interoception is the bodily foundation of embodiment, and that specific psychopathologies are best understood as failures to translate bodily signals into subjective feeling and self-awareness. Read here for two things it does that its better-controlled sources do not: it explicitly bridges the interoception–emotion literature to embodied-cognition theory, and it supplies the wiki’s most compact statement of the “translation deficit” framing of alexithymia and eating disorders.

The rest of the paper is synthesis of material the wiki already holds first-hand and from primary reports — Craig’s insular hierarchy (Craig (2009)), the somatic-marker hypothesis (Somatic marker hypothesis), Tsakiris’s interoception × body-ownership result (Experience of body ownership (EBO)), and the authors’ own heartbeat-perception programme (Pollatos et al. (2005), Pollatos et al. (2007)). So this page is deliberately thin on those, and holds the review as a framing document, not a source of new fact.

The one genuinely distinct move: interoception as the ground of embodied cognition

The wiki’s interoception literature and its embodied-cognition/constructionist literature mostly run in parallel. Herbert & Pollatos join them explicitly. Their argument: theories of embodied cognition (Niedenthal 2007; the Barsalou perceptual-symbols tradition) hold that higher cognition operates on reactivations of the sensory-motor states that occurred during experience with the world; interoceptive representations and their meta-representations are exactly such states for the internal body; therefore interoception, and individual differences in it (IA), should be “profoundly associated with emotional experience and cognitive functions.” They marshal their own and others’ correlational findings — IA predicts emotional intensity, benefits in decision making (Werner et al. 2009), and selective/divided attention (Matthias et al. 2009) — as the embodiment of emotional and cognitive processes in the visceral body.

This is the same interoception→emotion→cognition chain the wiki carries elsewhere, but stated as an embodied-cognition claim rather than a Jamesian or Bayesian one. It sits beside — not inside — the inferential? debate: Herbert & Pollatos are read-out theorists in the Craig/Damasio mold, invoking “reactivation of sensory-motor states” rather than predictive inference.

The “translation deficit” framing of psychopathology

The paper’s most reusable contribution. Following Fuchs & Schlimme (2009), it distinguishes the lived/subject body (Leib) from the object body (Körper), and classifies disturbances of embodiment by which is affected. Two clinical cases are worked as translation difficulties — a body that responds but whose signals do not reach conscious feeling:

• Alexithymia is reframed from an emotion-classification deficit to a disturbance in translating bodily signals to conscious awareness. The authors cite their own finding that high alexithymia scores go with low IA on a heartbeat-perception task (Herbert et al. 2010a), and relay Lane et al.’s (1997) “affective agnosia” reading — a present emotional bodily response with a lack of experiencing it as a feeling. This is directly relevant to the causal question tracked on Alexithymia: it is one more datum for the Brewer/Bird “alexithymia is a general deficit of interoception” direction, at the belief/questionnaire-plus-heartbeat level.
• Eating disorders (esp. anorexia nervosa) are placed on the object-body side — disturbed body image and explicit body awareness — but with reduced perception of visceral signals (hunger, satiety, and cardiac signals; Pollatos et al. 2008) contributing. Altered autonomic feedback is proposed as a maintaining factor.

See Quadt et al. (2018) and Bonaz et al. (2021) for the wiki’s fuller, later treatment of interoceptive psychopathology, and the Alexithymia page for why the “high alexithymia → low IA” heartbeat association splits by measurement level (it holds for believed interoception and vanishes for performed heartbeat counting, per Desmedt et al. 2022).

Time perception, briefly

A short section extends the insular-interoception account to the perception of time: our sense of duration may be constructed from a series of accumulated interoceptive/emotional “moments” processed in the insula (Craig 2009a; Wittmann 2009), with Wittmann et al. (2010) reporting accumulating neural activity in posterior insula that peaks at the end of an encoded interval. Recorded here as a pointer, not developed — none of the primary time-perception sources is in raw/, and the claim is tangential to the wiki’s core threads. It connects naturally to the Global emotional moment (Craig’s model of awareness) (Craig’s “cinemascopic” stream of sentient present moments).

How the wiki holds it

As a framing review at one remove. Its factual spine is held better elsewhere; its durable value is the embodied-cognition bridge and the translation-deficit vocabulary, both filed onto Embodied selfhood and Alexithymia. It is also the wiki’s second first-hand appearance of Olga Pollatos (here as review co-author rather than data author) and the first of Beate M. Herbert.