New study! SDT used to dissociate body ownership sensitivity from perceptual bias in the rubber hand illusion with partial visual occlusion. Disrupting visually-driven tactile predictions shifts perceptual bias but not visuotactile sensitivity. See below.

Result: people who naturally make these inferences are also the ones who:
→ remember more of what was said
→ and remember the relevant alternatives better
And neither working memory, or the ability to perceive the prosody in the first place shaped memory.

Two clusters emerged. We then compared these recall profiles with performance across several other tasks: inference drawing, prosody production & perception, working memory, verbal intelligence, and autism traits.

Using a preregistered machine-learning clustering approach to identify patterns in recall, we first compared several clustering algorithms, then validated the best solution on an independent dataset. Gaussian mixture models resulted in each person’s probability of belonging to a recall profile.

We used a delayed recall task: participants listened to short stories where one item was marked with either contrastive (L+H*) or broad (H+!H*) pitch accent:

"Mathias received a parcel with jackets, trousers, and shirts.
He kept [the shirts / SHIRTS]"

Individual differences in recall of focus and alternatives - Memory & Cognition Contrastive focus has been shown to enhance memory for focused elements and their contextual alternatives. However, recent work has shown that the memory effects of contrastive accenting vary across individuals. The present study investigates whether individual differences in memory for focus-related information reflect distinct recall patterns and which linguistic or cognitive abilities underlie these patterns. Native speakers of German completed a delayed-recall task in which contrastive focus was marked by pitch accenting, along with a battery of predictor tasks targeting different aspects of focus processing as well as broader linguistic and cognitive abilities. Using a probabilistic clustering approach, we identified two recall profiles that differed primarily in overall recall performance for focused elements and their alternatives. Participants who recalled more focus-related information also performed better on inference-based tasks, whereas prosodic perception and domain-general cognitive abilities did not predict recall profiles. These findings suggest that individual variability in the memory effects of contrastive focus is closely associated with inference-making ability and indicate that the encoding of contrast sets may be influenced by listener-specific inferential abilities.

New paper from my time in linguistics!
The tone in which we say something shapes what people remember - not just what was said (“I want the PIZZA”), but also what was implied (definitely not the salad).
Main result: not everyone will remember it the way you wanted.
doi.org/10.3758/s134...

The Role of Interoception in Felt Presence and Psychosis Risk Abstract. Background: Felt presence (FP) – the sensation of someone nearby without sensory evidence – is common in healthy adults and related to psychosis risk. FP may arise from a misattribution of i...

🍇 New paper 🍇

Ever felt like someone was in the room when no one was there?

Together with @parkbmb.bsky.social @tatianabaxter.bsky.social we asked whether that might reflect misperceiving signals from our own beating heart - and if this relates to psychosis risk.

doi.org/10.1159/0005...

Interoception vs. Exteroception: Cardiac interoception competes with tactile perception, yet also facilitates self-relevance encoding | PNAS Internal bodily signals, notably the heartbeat, influence our perception of the external world—but the nature of this influence remains unclear. Di...

My very first paper is finally out in @pnas.org, with Catherine Tallon-Baudry and Patrick Haggard! Interoception, exteroception, the self and more, it's got it all.

Also it should go open access at some point
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

@thirdculturekat.bsky.social @jlebovitz.bsky.social @tatianabaxter.bsky.social @ccrosenphd.bsky.social @parkbmb.bsky.social @lkfazio.bsky.social @afelsenheimer.bsky.social @annaciaunica.bsky.social
Affective Somatic Politics. Our bodies keep the score.

Felt Presence and Psychosis Risk in the General Population Abstract. Objective: Felt presence (FP) is the experience that another entity is present in one’s proximal environment, despite no sensory evidence. Occurrence of FP is linked to psychosis risk, but q...

@parkbmb.bsky.social Our paper 'Felt Presence and Psychosis Risk in the General Population' is available, open-access in Psychopathology! In this survey, distress during FP predicted high psychosis-risk, resilience was linked with FP frequency & vividness. Read more: karger.com/psp/article/...

Somatosensation and the sense of self In this primer, Patrick Haggard and Matthew Longo consider how sensory signals from receptors throughout the body are integrated to produce the sense of a coherent, continuous, sentient body that form...

New primer in Cell from Patrick Haggard & @mattlongo.bsky.social

Somatosensation and the sense of self: Current Biology www.cell.com/current-biol...

#interoception #exteroception #affect #neuroskyence

Villringer et al. Figure 1. Conceptual framework for brain–body states

Villringer et al. Figure 2 Brain–body micro-, meso-, and macro-states can be distinguished on the basis of their duration and reversibility

'Brain–body states as a link between cardiovascular and mental health'

by Arno Villringer, Vadim Nikulin & Michael Gaebler @mbe-lab.bsky.social @michaelgaebler.com @mpicbs.bsky.social sky.social

www.cell.com/trends/neuro...

What if many psychiatric disorders share the same hidden glitch in how the brain infers reality? In a new volume, Al Powers and I gather experts to examine how disrupted sensory inference across #vision, #touch, #proprioception and #interoception might unify our understanding.

That’s a wrap! Thoroughly enjoyed my time at @bacn.co.uk. Looking forward to next year, in Brighton 🏖️🎡 @sarahgarf.bsky.social

British Association for Cognitive Neuroscience Day 2: @afelsenheimer.bsky.social detailing her work on the effect of self touch on anxiety, Rania-Iman on heartbeat evoked potential analysis, and @hannahsavage.bsky.social presenting a novel test for gastric interoception.

Always a pleasure to hear the exciting work in a fast presentation data blitz session. From my lab, @oliwiastecko.bsky.social detailing the unexpected journey replicating prior work on memory & the heart. Find out more in poster #4 at #BACN2025

Making Sense of Sensation: A model of Interoceptive Attribution and Appraisal with Clinical applications

New preprint from @drhannahsavage.bsky.social & @sarahgarf.bsky.social

#interoception #neuroskyence 🧠🫀🫁

osf.io/preprints/ps...

🚨 New paper out!
Phase confusion: How inconsistent cardiac labeling obscures interoception research 🫀🧠

We unpack methodological incosistencies and propose a way forward with the HEARTS framework.

In Biol. Psychol. - Open Access:
🔗 shorturl.at/YJhyn

1st paper of great @angeliacaparco.bsky.social!

Autonomic modulations to cardiac dynamics in response to affective touch: Differences between social touch and self-touch The autonomic nervous system plays a vital role in self-regulation and responding to environmental demands. Autonomic dynamics have been hypothesized to be involved in perceptual awareness and establi...

Gentle, slow stroke touch significantly moves the heart by lowering rate and increasing rhythmicity. This effect is much stronger when someone else touches us, compared to self-touch. Out now in IEEE Trans Affective Comp @rebeccaboehme.bsky.social, @paulasalamone.bsky.social doi.org/10.1109/TAFF...

Bodily Self-Dysfunction in Psychosis: Altered Neural and Spinal Response to Self-produced Sensations Psychosis is often characterized by disturbances in the sense of self, with patients frequently misattributing self-produced sensations to external sources. While somatic hallucinations and mispercept...

New preprint! ⬇️🤩

We find a reduced self-other distinction in psychosis 😶‍🌫️, including increased neural activity during self-touch 🧠, reduced latency differences already at the *spinal cord* level 😲, and diminished interoceptive accuracy 🫀.

#neuroskyence
#PsychSciSky
#AcademicSky

We’re recruiting participants for the Em-Body study! Check your eligibility and sign up here: shorturl.at/AEelF

I thought it could be nice to connect the community of researchers exploring body-brain interactions on bsky, so here is the Body-Brain Interactions Starter Pack! 🫀🫁👀🧠 #neuroskyence #academicsky

Let me know if you would like to be added or know someone to add. Enjoy and share!

go.bsky.app/Fwqeu32

What a better way to start on this platform than (re)sharing this amazing resource by IGOR 🚀

Hello interoception community, given the desultory mood elsewhere I thought I'd hop over here to be a part of this community as well.

There are a lot of interesting things happening, not the least of which is this NIH interoception meeting on Nov 11th: www.nccih.nih.gov/news/events/... 🧠🫀 🧠🩺