{
  "id": 6803088,
  "title": "Cardiac belief updating from volatile physiological afferents",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/11/cardiac-belief-updating-from-volatile-physiological-afferents",
  "topic": "health",
  "section": "Health & Medicine",
  "published": "2026-09-11T00:00:00.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "bioRxiv",
    "slug": "biorxiv",
    "url": "https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.04.749527v1?rss=1"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Cardiac interoception, the perception of internal bodily signals like heart rate, is typically evaluated by contrasting individuals' subjective heart rate perceptions with objective physiological readings. However, such subjective beliefs can sometimes skew these measurements, making it difficult to differentiate between sensitivity to afferent signals and the impact of pre-existing expectations. This complexity calls into question whether behaviors elicited during these tasks genuinely reflect interoceptive processes. To address this, we present a computational model that utilizes naturally occurring heart rate variability to assess the degree to which perceptual beliefs are revised by physiological data. We conceptualize interoception as a weighted Bayesian updating process, taking into account both expectations and direct afferent input, and introduce a novel metric, cardiac interoceptive sensitivity, which measures how responsive beliefs are to incoming physiological signals. Applying this approach to the most comprehensive Heart Rate Discrimination dataset available (comprising 549 participants), we observe that while the healthy population exhibits relatively weak sensitivity, there is considerable variation among individuals, with 43% displaying behaviors that at least partially align with interoceptive processing. These results challenge traditional assessments of cardiac interoception and propose a new methodology for linking involuntary bodily signals, which are beyond experimental control, with externally measurable stimuli. This computational framework lays the groundwork for a more nuanced understanding of how our bodies' internal cues are interpreted in relation to external cues, offering a fresh perspective on embodied psychophysics.",
  "summary": "Cardiac interoception is commonly assessed by comparing subjective estimates of heart rate with physiological measurements. But beliefs can easily obscure these measures, such that they cannot readily distinguish sensitivity to afferent signals from the influence of prior expectations; this ultimately challenges the notion that behaviours under these tasks could reflect interoceptive processes at…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}