Interoception Across the Lifespan

Interoceptive signals are present before birth, contributing to basic homeostatic functions and the development of complex psychological processes, such as emotional experience, learning, and decision-making. The way in which interoceptive abilities develop, however, is relatively understudied. This chapter presents research on interoceptive processing across the lifespan, from infancy to late adulthood. Accuracy perceiving interoceptive signals appears to improve throughout childhood, although more valid tasks spanning a range of interoceptive signals are required, as is research into interoceptive attention and interoceptive insight. While interoception may decrease in adolescence, direct empirical investigation of interoceptive abilities is particularly lacking during this developmental period. Investigation of interoception in later life is also sparse, but evidence suggests that both interoceptive accuracy and attention decrease with age, perhaps owing to an increase in physical health problems, and more noisy interoceptive signals. Beyond the general methodological difficulties in the field, one of the most notable challenges to our understanding of interoceptive development is the lack of longitudinal studies. As the majority of developmental research compares cohorts of different ages, it is difficult to estimate changes within individuals over time; effects may be driven by environmental factors, such as social and cultural changes over time, rather than by age itself. It is therefore crucial to study interoceptive abilities using well-validated tasks across a range of interoceptive domains and signal channels, within the same individuals across the lifespan.