Matthias Ellen, Schandry Rainer, Duschek Stefan, Pollatos Olga
Department of Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilian-University, Munich, Germany.
Int J Psychophysiol. 2009 May;72(2):154-9. doi: 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2008.12.001. Epub 2008 Dec 7.
Mental processes related to visceral activity have gained growing interest during the last few years. The following study is the first to investigate possible interactions between interoceptive awareness and measures of attentional performance. We tested the hypothesis whether interoceptive awareness is positively related to indices of selective and divided attentional performances. Using a heartbeat perception task, 29 healthy female participants were separated into two groups scoring either high or low in an interoceptive awareness task. Attentional performance was assessed by several tests including the 'd2 test of attention' and subtests from the 'TAP: Test Battery for Attentional Performance'. We observed a significantly better performance in selective and divided attention for participants with high interoceptive awareness. Our data suggests that interoceptive awareness is related to a better performance especially in tasks assessing selective and divided attention. We conclude 1) that perception of bodily states might be a crucial determinant for the processing of external, visual stimuli, 2) that the ability to perceive internal signals might be an indicator of self-focused attention, and 3) that bodily signals may use, at least in part, similar processing resources as signals from the attention system.
在过去几年中，与内脏活动相关的心理过程越来越受到关注。以下研究首次调查了内感受性觉知与注意力表现测量之间可能存在的相互作用。我们检验了一个假设，即内感受性觉知是否与选择性和分散性注意力表现指标呈正相关。通过一项心跳感知任务，29名健康女性参与者被分为两组，在内感受性觉知任务中得分高或低。注意力表现通过多项测试进行评估，包括“注意力d2测试”以及“注意力表现测试组合（TAP）”中的子测试。我们观察到，内感受性觉知高的参与者在选择性和分散性注意力方面表现明显更好。我们的数据表明，内感受性觉知与更好的表现相关，尤其是在评估选择性和分散性注意力的任务中。我们得出以下结论：1）身体状态的感知可能是处理外部视觉刺激的关键决定因素；2）感知内部信号的能力可能是自我关注注意力的一个指标；3）身体信号可能至少部分地使用与注意力系统信号相似的处理资源。
