Interoceptive abilities facilitate taking another's spatial perspective

Abstract

Information can be perceived from a multiplicity of spatial perspectives, which is central to effectively understanding and interacting with our environment and other people. Interoception, the sense of the physiological state of our body, is also a fundamental component contributing to our perception. However, whether the perception of our inner body signals influences our ability to adopt and flexibly change between different spatial perspectives remains poorly understood. To investigate this, 90 participants completed tasks assessing multiple dimensions of interoception (interoceptive sensibility, cardiac interoceptive accuracy and awareness) and the Graphesthesia task to assess tactile spatial perspective-taking and its flexibility. The results revealed that higher cardiac interoceptive awareness is associated with greater consistency in adopting a perspective decentred from the self. Second, higher cardiac interoceptive accuracy was associated with slower and less accurate performance in switching from a decentred to an egocentred perspective. These results show that interoceptive abilities facilitate decentred spatial perspective-taking, likely reflecting stronger perceived boundaries between internal states and the external world.

Figure 1

Experimental procedure. First, the participants performed the Heartbeat Counting Task, with confidence ratings on their performance, followed by the Time Estimation Task, and then completed the MAIA-2 (see “Procedure”). Second, the participants performed the Graphesthesia task without any instruction regarding how they should interpret the letters b, d, p, q, to assess which perspective they spontaneously adopted (Graphesthesia session 1, free spatial perspective). Finally, participants performed a second session (S2) of the Graphesthesia task in which they were instructed to take the perspective indicated on the screen (Graphesthesia session 2, imposed switch spatial perspective). Note that the conditions Egocentred-trunk (ego) and Decentred (dec) are displayed here as an example; but for those participants who had a majority of responses with an Egocentred-head perspective in the second part (Natural), the Egocentred-trunk condition was replaced with the Egocentred-head condition. SPT: spatial perspective-taking.

Figure 2

Results of the Graphesthesia task. (1.a) Proportions of participants assigned as egocentred-trunk, egocentred-head, or decentred based on the majority of their responses in the free session (Session 1). (1.b) Percentage of responses for each potential perspective (Egocentred-trunk, Decentred, Egocentred-head) within session 1 across all participants (i.e., without taking into account which perspective participants adopted the most). (2.a). Average accuracy and (2.b) Reaction Times results in Session 2 for trials where participants were repeating the same or switching between imposed perspectives, regardless of their preferred perspective. Ego egocentred, Dec decentred.

Figure 3

Partial correlation plots of linear regression analyses. (1) Residual plot of consistency on decentred trials in session 1 and interoceptive awareness. (2.a) Residual plot of accuracy when switching from decentred to egocentred perspectives in session 2 and interoceptive accuracy. (2.b) Residual plot of RTs when switching from decentred to egocentred perspectives in session 2 and interoceptive accuracy. Data points for each participant are depicted by circle markers and standard errors are depicted in the shaded intervals.