ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2016
Towards a psychophysics of interoceptive processes: the measurement of heartbeat detection.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 110 papers, 4 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
110 citing papers in PubMed, 4 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- A meta-analysis of the effects of mindfulness meditation training on self-reported interoception.Scientific reports · 2025Pooled it
- Pooled it
- The relationship between mindfulness and objective measures of body awareness: A meta-analysis.Scientific reports · 2019Pooled it
- An interoceptive model of bulimia nervosa: A neurobiological systematic review.Journal of psychiatric research · 2017Pooled it
- Two weeks to tune in: Evaluating the effects of a short-term body scan on interoception.Applied psychology. Health and well-being · 2025Trial
- Two weeks to tune in: Evaluating the effects of a short-term body scan on interoception.Applied psychology. Health and well-being · 2025Trial
- Two weeks to tune in: Evaluating the effects of a short-term body scan on interoception.Applied psychology. Health and well-being · 2025Trial
- Change starts with the body: Interoceptive appreciation mediates the effect of mindfulness training on behavior change - an effect moderated by depression severity.Psychiatry research · 2024Trial
- A machine learning approach towards the differentiation between interoceptive and exteroceptive attention.The European journal of neuroscience · 2023Trial
- Changes in interoception after alcohol administration correlate with expectancies and subjective effects.Addiction biology · 2022Trial
- The impact of a brief mindfulness training on interoception: A randomized controlled trial.PloS one · 2022Trial
- Trial
- Functional neuroanatomy of interoceptive processing in children and adolescents: a pilot study.Scientific reports · 2019Trial
- The Mind From Within: Visceral Roots of Human Cognition.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Review
- Evidence for Cardiac Phase-Linked Perception of Heartbeats.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- Individual Differences in Heartbeat-Tone Synchronicity Judgments Suggest the Two-Alternative Heartbeat Detection Task Is a Poor Test of Cardiac Interoceptive Accuracy and Insight.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- Age Differences in the Relationship Between Interoception and Emotional Processing.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Validity and Reliability of the Heart Rate Matching Task: A Novel Measure of Heart Rate Estimation.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- Prefrontal dysregulation of interoceptive and emotional processing in episodic migraine: a task-based fMRI study.The journal of headache and pain · 2026Article
- Operationalizing the Mind-Body Connection: Interoception via the Autonomic Nervous System.NeuroSci · 2026Article
50 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It is difficult to collect objective evidence of interoception. Unlike exteroception, the effective stimuli for interoception are often unknown, and even when identifiable, they are difficult to control experimentally. Furthermore, direct stimulation of the interoceptors is seldom appropriate in human experimentation. Hence, non-invasive behavioural measures of accuracy in heartbeat detection have frequently been adopted to index interoceptive sensitivity. However, there has been little standardization and the two most popular methods for assessing heartbeat detection, heartbeat tracking and two alternative forced choice methods, appear to be biased and of questionable validity. These issues do not arise with other methods that are based on classical psychophysics and that enable subjects to indicate when during the cardiac cycle their heartbeat sensations occur. Not only are these classical methods highly reliable, but they also provide continuous unbiased measures of the temporal locations of heartbeat sensations and the precision with which these sensations are detected.This article is part of the themed issue 'Interoception beyond homeostasis: affect, cognition and mental health'.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.