The Impact of Interoception on Learning, Memory, and Decision-Making

While early interoception research focused on emotional processing, there is a growing interest in investigating the brain–body interaction and the contribution of conscious perception to cognitive processing. This chapter reviews the current literature on the impact of the various dimensions of interoception on learning, memory, and decision-making. First, we present research using implicit and explicit learning paradigms. Though the reported studies contain different learning and memory methods (fear conditioning, word stem completion, recognition, autobiographical memory, and neuropsychological tests), taken together, findings suggest that access to information about bodily states facilitates learning and memory. Findings concerning the role of interoception in decision-making, however, are less consistent. While some results suggest that better interoceptive accuracy improves decision-making under conditions of uncertainty, others indicate both improvement and hindrance of decision-making performance depending on anticipatory bodily signals for different choices. Still, other studies do not find a clear relationship between interoceptive dimensions and decisions under uncertain conditions. Studies on social and moral decision-making are rare but suggest that higher objective interoceptive accuracy is associated with greater psychological and physiological arousal in social decision-making situations. All in all, studies on the relationship between interoception and cognitive functions have focused very strongly on the cardiovascular system largely assessing objective interoceptive accuracyInteroceptive accuracy using the heartbeat counting task. More research is required to provide evidence from other domains and tasks. Furthermore, the different measures used across studies and debates surrounding the conceptualization of self-reported interoceptive attentionInteroceptive attention complicate the interpretation of results.