Comparison of interoceptive accuracy across organ domains: A pilot study

Interoception – the perception of bodily signals - is
thought to regulate a wide range of psychological and
somatic functions. Interoceptive accuracy, the objective
performance in detecting internal bodily sensations, is
often regarded as a unitary construct, assuming that humans
have a general ability to perceive signals originating
from different organ domains. Yet, recent studies provide
contradictory evidence regarding the comparability of
interoceptive accuracy, prompting reconsideration of interoception
as a general ability. Moreover, tasks used to
compare interoceptive accuracy across organ domains
often present differences in terms of stimulation characteristics,
intensity levels and response requirements, further
complicating comparisons. Therefore, the aim of this
pilot study was to develop a new set of largely comparable
tasks across the respiratory, esophageal and cardiac domain
in order to assess the generalizability versus organ
specificity of interoceptive accuracy. Healthy participants
(n=33) took part in a behavioral experiment with inspiratory
resistive loads, esophageal balloon distensions and
a cardiovascular arousal task. In each task, participants
were asked to provide intensity ratings to different levels
of individually calibrated stimulus intensities. Accuracy
scores, calculated as the change in ratings over change in
objective intensity, showed that interoceptive accuracy
was not correlated across organ domains ( r values < .21,
p values > .242). These findings suggest that interoceptive
accuracy is a domain- specific ability.