Jennifer Murphy & Geoff Bird (2025)
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2025.106126
With the growing interest in apps and wearables that claim to be able to help us to learn how to improve our awareness of our own bodies’ signals, Murphy & Bird consider whether these claims can stand up. Evidence of better scores after training might not be about better awareness of our bodies. It could be something else, like knowing the test better. This paper focuses on heartbeat awareness training.
Cueing?
People might improve at heartbeat detection tasks by actually getting better at feeling their heartbeats — their perception becomes more accurate. But this – like our experience of vision – might only be because we have been cued by the app to pay attention.
Labelling?
Alternatively, people could be quite aware of their heartbeat but have never really thought about it or have thought of it as a part of another bodily sensation. The training lets them label it better but may not increase accuracy of perception.
Boosting?
Exercise makes heartbeats identifiable but this may not be increasing your accuracy in spotting them. Instead, we may be learning to unconsciously hold our breath or tighten our muscles to give ourselves a perceptual boost.
Learning to play the game?
Sometimes, a user might have ok interoceptive accuracy to start with but not be able to match the heartbeat tones in an interoception training app. Learning to match the tones would not be learning better interoception; rather it would be learning how to get along with the task.
Cheating?
Consciously or unconsciously, if you know your average heart-rate it is possible to make a good guess in a task that involves counting your heartbeats.
Learning it all?
Alternatively, doing better in this training might be because it’s measuring a few things at once, awareness of heartbeats, reaction to beeps, switching attention between them, and keeping the attention going. It would be hard to say if the interoception learning is happening or not.
Learning to chill?
Finally, doing better in this training might simply be down to not worrying about it, which is far easier if you’ve done it several times. And everytime you do it better, it gets less stressful, so you do even better again.
So…. how do find out if this training works?
Murphy & Bird suggest an experiment that would get participants to do one of two heartbeat tests as a baseline. Then either:
- Practice one heartbeat task with feedback to help improve.
- Practice the same heartbeat task but without feedback.
- Practice a control task matched in structure to the heartbeat task (something with timing and attention but not heartbeat).
- Just simply focus on heartbeat sensations without any task or feedback.
- Or learn factual info about heart rate, like how often the heart beats and why.
- Finally, participants would be tested on their baseline task… and the one they didn’t do to see if training is generalisable.