Respiratory and Cardiac Interoceptive Sensitivity in the First Two Years of Life

Several recent theoretical accounts have posited that interoception, the perception of internal bodily signals, plays a vital role in early human development. Yet, empirical evidence of cardiac interoceptive sensitivity in infants to date has been mixed. Furthermore, existing evidence does not go beyond the perception of cardiac signals and focuses only on the age of 5-7 months, limiting the generalizability of the results. Here, we used a modified version of the cardiac interoceptive sensitivity paradigm introduced by Maister et al. (2017) in 3-, 9-, and 18-month-old infants using cross-sectional and longitudinal approaches. Going beyond, we introduce a novel experimental paradigm, namely the iBREATH, to investigate respiratory interoceptive sensitivity in infants. Overall, for cardiac interoceptive sensitivity (total n = 135) we find rather stable evidence across ages with infants on average preferring stimuli presented synchronously to their heartbeat. For respiratory interoceptive sensitivity (total n = 120) our results show a similar pattern in the first year of life, but not at 18 months. We did not observe a strong relationship between cardiac and respiratory interoceptive sensitivity at 3 and 9 months but found some evidence for a relationship at 18 months. We validated our results using specification curve- and mega analytic approaches. By examining early cardiac and respiratory interoceptive processing, we provide evidence that infants are sensitive to their interoceptive signals.