Neurosciences Research Centre, St George's University of London, London, UK.
Department of Psychiatry, National Hospital Organization Shimofusa Psychiatric Medical Center, Chiba, Japan.
Sci Rep. 2022 Aug 10;12(1):13624. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-16569-6.
Interoception, the sense of the internal physiological state of the body, theoretically underpins aspects of self-representation. Experimental studies link feelings of body ownership to interoceptive perception, yet few studies have tested for association between the sense of agency and interoceptive processing. Here, we combined an intentional binding paradigm with cardiac measures of interoceptive processing (behavioural performance on a heartbeat discrimination task, and effects of timing within the cardiac cycle) in twenty-six non-clinical participants as an exploratory study. We found performance accuracy on the heartbeat discrimination task correlated positively with the intentional binding effect, an index of sense of agency (β = 0.832, p = 0.005), even after controlling for effects of age, sex, educational level, heart rate, heart rate variability and time accuracy. The intentional binding effect was enhanced during cardiac systole (compared to diastole) in individuals with greater heartbeat discrimination accuracy (β = 0.640, p = 0.047). These findings support the proposal that interoception contributes to mechanisms underlying the emergence of sense of agency.
内感受，即对身体内部生理状态的感知，从理论上支撑了自我表现的各个方面。实验研究将身体所有权的感觉与内感受知觉联系起来，但很少有研究测试代理感和内感受加工之间的关联。在这里，我们结合意向绑定范式和心脏内感受处理的心脏测量（心跳辨别任务的行为表现，以及心脏周期内时间的影响），在 26 名非临床参与者中进行了一项探索性研究。我们发现，心跳辨别任务的表现准确性与代理感的指标——意向绑定效应呈正相关（β=0.832，p=0.005），即使在控制年龄、性别、教育水平、心率、心率变异性和时间准确性的影响后也是如此。在个体的心跳辨别准确性较高时（与舒张期相比），意向绑定效应在心脏收缩期增强（β=0.640，p=0.047）。这些发现支持了内感受有助于代理感出现机制的提出。
