How does aging affect our ability to sense our own body?
As adults age, both their subjective awareness of internal bodily signals and their objective accuracy in detecting their own heartbeat decline.
Source
Direct and indirect effects of age on interoceptive accuracy and awareness across the adult lifespan
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Online BPQ (Study 1) plus lab heartbeat-tracking accuracy with age mediation (Study 2)
- N
- Study 1: 345 healthy adults from a 1,008-person survey; Study 2: 136 after 4 exclusions
- Population
- Healthy adults spanning a wide age range
- Outcome
- Self-reported interoceptive awareness and heartbeat-tracking accuracy as a function of age
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How does aging affect our ability to sense our own body?
These passages occur verbatim in the stored paper text. They support the points listed below; they do not verify every statement in the explanation.
18% of the effect
The indirect effect of BMI accounted for 0.18 (18%) of the total effect between age and interoception ( ab/c ; see Jose, ), indicating partial mediation.
How is interoception defined in the introduction of this paper?
Interoception is described as the perception of the physical condition of the body (Craig, ), including numerous visceral sensations such as hunger, itch, respiratory and cardiac awareness (Khalsa & Lapidus, ).
What they did
In the initial study, 345 healthy adults aged 18 to 89 completed an online questionnaire measuring their subjective awareness of bodily sensations. In the subsequent study, 136 participants aged 20 to 90 completed a physical heartbeat tracking task to measure objective accuracy, alongside a time-counting control task. The researchers also collected physiological measures like BMI, blood pressure, resting heart rate, heart rate variability, and participants' general beliefs about average heart rates.
What they found
Subjective body awareness significantly decreased with age (r = -.337). Objective heartbeat tracking accuracy also declined across the adult lifespan (r = -.21), a relationship that was partially mediated by an age-related increase in body mass index, which accounted for 18% of the effect. Even after accounting for bodily and psychological variables, age still exerted a direct negative effect on interoceptive accuracy.
The limits
What it doesn't show
This study relies on correlational data, meaning it cannot prove that aging directly causes the decline in interoceptive abilities. These studies examined subjective awareness and objective accuracy in separate participant groups, so it remains unclear how these different dimensions relate within the same individuals over time. Additionally, the objective tests relied on a single modality, cardiac tracking, which may not represent how aging affects other sensory modalities like hunger, breathing, or pain.
Key terms
- Interoception
- The perception and integration of internal bodily signals, such as heartbeats, breathing, hunger, and temperature.
- Interoceptive accuracy
- The objective ability to accurately detect internal physiological signals, typically measured using performance tasks.
- Interoceptive sensibility
- A self-reported, subjective measure of how aware an individual believes they are of their internal bodily sensations.
- Heartbeat tracking task
- An experimental method where participants count their heartbeats during specific time intervals without physically taking their pulse.
- Mediation analysis
- A statistical method used to determine if the relationship between an independent variable and a dependent variable is influenced by an intervening variable.
- Body Mass Index (BMI)
- A measure of body fat based on height and weight that applies to adult men and women.
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How is interoception defined in the introduction of this paper?
Common questions
Why does Body Mass Index (BMI) relate to heartbeat detection?
Higher BMI is often associated with more physical tissue (like body fat) between the heart and the skin's surface, which can physically dampen the sensations of heartbeats and make them harder to detect.
Did older adults perform worse on all counting tasks, or just heartbeats?
While older adults showed a slight decline in counting seconds, the age-related decline in heartbeat tracking remained significant even when controlling for general counting and timing abilities.
How was the control task structured?
The control task used the exact same time intervals as the heartbeat task, but asked participants to count passing seconds rather than their own heartbeats to control for general counting accuracy.
Were there differences between men and women in their body awareness?
No, the initial study did not find any significant differences in self-reported body perception questionnaire scores between male and female participants.
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