Journal
PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 371, Issue 1708, Pages -Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2016.0018
Keywords
interoception; meta-analysis; functional magnetic resonance imaging; brain activity; cardioception; heartbeat detection task
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Funding
- Federal Ministry of Education and Research [01EO1004]
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Interoception is the ability to perceive one's internal body state including visceral sensations. Heart-focused interoception has received particular attention, in part due to a readily available task for behavioural assessment, but also due to accumulating evidence for a significant role in emotional experience, decision-making and clinical disorders such as anxiety and depression. Improved understanding of the underlying neural correlates is important to promote development of anatomical-functional models and suitable intervention strategies. In the present meta-analysis, nine studies reporting neural activity associated with interoceptive attentiveness (i.e. focused attention to a particular interoceptive signal for a given time interval) to one's heartbeat were submitted to a multilevel kernel density analysis. The findings corroborated an extended network associated with heart-focused interoceptive attentiveness including the posterior right and left insula, right claustrum, precentral gyrus and medial frontal gyrus. Right-hemispheric dominance emphasizes non-verbal information processing with the posterior insula presumably serving as the major gateway for cardioception. Prefrontal neural activity may reflect both top-down attention deployment and processing of feed-forward cardioceptive information, possibly orchestrated via the claustrum. This article is part of the themed issue 'Interoception beyond homeostasis: affect, cognition and mental health'.
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