Older adults show a higher heartbeat-evoked potential than young adults and a negative association with everyday metacognition

The ability to monitor internal bodily and cognitive processes is essential for everyday
functioning and independence in older adults, because it allows for adjustments when lapses
in performance are imminent. In the present study, age-related morphological changes to the
heartbeat evoked potential (HEP), an electrophysiological cortical representation of cardiac
signals, and its association with self-reported everyday cognition were examined. A
community sample of older adults showed an increased HEP amplitude, which could reflect a
stronger representation of early stages of cardiac interoception, and a more anterior scalp
distribution of the HEP, suggesting a more widespread configuration of the underlying neural
generators, compared to a group of young adults. Furthermore, in older adults, HEP amplitude
was negatively correlated with self-estimated everyday cognitive functioning. Older adults
with pronounced cortical representations of peripheral signals may thus be more likely to take
note of lapses in their own bodily and cognitive function, leading to lower estimates of their
cognitive abilities. These results provide novel insights into age-related changes in
interoceptive processing and their association with metacognitive judgments, with potentially
far-reaching implications for cognitive aging and age-related cognitive decline.