Action understanding of children develops from simple associative learning to mentalizing. With the rise of embodied cognition, the role of interoception in action observation and action understanding has received more attention. From a developmental perspective, this study proposes a novel developmental model that explores how interoception promotes action understanding of children across ages. In early infancy, most actions observed in infants come from interactions with their caregivers. Babies learn about action effects through automatic interoceptive processing and interoceptive feedback. Interoception in (...) early infancy is not fully developed, such as the not fully developed gastrointestinal tract and intestinal nervous system. Therefore, in early infancy, action understanding is based on low-level and original interoceptive information. At this stage, after observing the actions of others, infants can create mental representations or even imitate actions without external visual feedback, which requires interoception to provide internal reference information. By early childhood, children begin to infer action intentions of other people by integrating various types of information to reach the mentalizing level. Interoception processing requires the integration of multiple internal signals, which promotes the information integration ability of children. Interoception also provides inner information for reasoning about action intention. This review also discussed the neural mechanisms of interoception and possible ways by which it could promote action understanding of children. In early infancy, the central autonomic neural network (CAN) automatically processes and responds to the actions of caregivers on infants, providing interoceptive information for action understanding of infants. In infancy, the growth of the somatomotor system provides important internal reference information for observing and imitating the actions of infants. In early childhood, the development of interoception of children facilitates the integration of internal and external information, which promotes the mentalization of action understanding of children. According to the proposed developmental model of action understanding of children promoted by interoception, there are multilevel and stage-dependent characteristics that impact the role of interoception in action understanding of children. (shrink)

Interoception in the broader sense refers to the perception of internal states, including the perception of the actual state of the internal organs and the motor system. Dimensions of interoception include interoceptive accuracy, i.e., the ability to sense internal changes assessed with behavioral tests, confidence rating with respect to perceived performance in an actual behavioral test, and interoceptive sensibility, i.e., the self-reported generalized ability to perceive body changes. The relationship between dimension of cardioceptive and proprioceptive modalities and their association with (...) affect are scarcely studied. In the present study, undergraduate students filled out questionnaires assessing positive and negative affect, interoceptive sensibility, and body competence. Following this, they completed a behavioral task assessing cardioceptive accuracy and two tasks assessing proprioceptive accuracy with respect to the tension of arm flexor muscles and the angular position of the elbow joint. Confidence ratings were measured with visual analog scales after the tasks. With the exception of a weak association between cardioceptive accuracy and the respective confidence rating, no associations between and within modalities were found with respect to various dimensions of interoception. Further, the interoceptive dimensions were not associated with state and trait positive and negative affect and perceived body competence. In summary, interoceptive accuracy scores do not substantially contribute to conscious representations of cardioceptive and proprioceptive ability. Within our data, non-pathological affective states are not associated with the major dimensions of interoception for the cardiac and proprioceptive modalities. (shrink)

Edited by Manos Tsakiris and Helena De Preester, (Oxford, Oxford University Press), 2019, 368 pages,To understand the nature of mind, cognitive scientists of all theoretical strands may benefit from considering experimental evidence of cognition (perception, attention, memory, etc.) alongside phenomenologies of (conscious) experiences and feelings-let's say, proprioceptive, exteroceptive, interoceptive, and bodily self-conscious. Roughly, the former dimension of scientific studies of mind seems to have found its legitimacy; however, at least, at first sight, the latter could still not be exonerated completely. (...) That is to say, as far as the scientifically evidence-based account of interoception is concerned, we will have come a long way towards buttressing its legitimacy. The Interoceptive Mind: From Homeostasis to Awareness (Tsakiris and De Preester, 2019) would be seen as a guide to scientific studies of interoception in all of the cases so far. In particular, the essays collected in this book shed light on multisensory integrations of interoceptive and exteroceptive feelings (and even self-conscious feelings) across widespread disciplines.As suggested in its title, the book addresses the difficulties of integrating various dimensions relevant to feelings-from the biological notion of self to the interoceptive origin of self-awareness. The book divides into four sections, and each chapter is worthy of careful attention.Part I, i.e., the first chapter introduces the histor... (shrink)