Feeling the beat: Temporal and spatial perception of heartbeat sensations

Abstract

The majority of interoceptive tasks (i.e. measuring the sensitivity to bodily signals) are based upon the heartbeat sensations perception. However, temporal perception of heartbeats varies among individuals and confidence and spatial perception of heartbeats in relation to temporal judgements have not yet been systematically investigated. This study examined the perception of heartbeat sensations in both time and spatial domains, using a multi-interval heartbeat discrimination task. The relationship between these domains was investigated, as well as the contribution of mental health conditions and cardiovascular parameters. Heartbeat sensations occurred on average ~250ms after the ECG R-wave and were more frequently sampled from the left part of the chest. Participants’ confidence in their experience of heartbeat sensations was maximal for the 0 ms interval. Interestingly, higher confidence was related to reduced dispersion of sampling locations but we found evidence toward the absence of relationship between temporal and spatial heartbeat sensations perception, using Bayesian statistics. Finally, we found evidence toward a relationship between spatial precision of heartbeat sensations and state anxiety score, which seems independent from the cardiovascular parameters. This systematic investigation of heartbeat sensations perception provides important fresh insights, informing the mechanistic understanding of the interoceptive signaling contribution to emotion, cognition and behaviour.

Sensory processing in autism across exteroceptive and interoceptive domains.

“…In heartbeat tracking tasks (Schandry, 1981), participants are required to count their heartbeats over different time intervals (typically between 25 and 60s) without taking their pulse, and accuracy is based on the ratio of perceived to actual heartbeats. It is common practice not to instruct participants on how or where to detect heartbeats, and the location of heartbeat sensations during these tasks has been neglected by research, although there are now investigations in the spatial and temporal relationships in heartbeat detection tasks (Betka et al, 2020). Findings to date using this tracking task are mixed, with some studies demonstrating higher accuracy in nonautistic adults (Mul et al, 2018) and children (Nicholson et al, 2019; Palser et al, 2018).…”

Heart is deceitful above all things: Threat expectancy induces the illusory perception of increased heartrate

“…Here, we ask whether such an integration of expectations and sensory evidence occurs for the perception of one's heartbeat, that is, whether the perception of our cardiac state is illusorily distorted towards expectations. On the one hand, heartbeat sensations are assumed to reflect blood ejection from the heart into the aorta at ventricular systole, as well as physical changes within the vessels, chest and body (including the somatosensory, quasi-interoceptive, hitting of the inner chest wall by the heart, Betka et al 2020). On the other hand, while people are sensitive to their actual heart rate changes (mean d' > 1, Fittipaldi et al 2020), they tend to undercount their actual heart rates (Corneille et al, 2020;Zamariola et al, 2018), and their reports are biased by their prior beliefs about how quickly their heart would beat (Körmendi et al, 2021;Ring & Brener, 1996).…”