title: Interoceptive ability and body awareness in autism spectrum disorder.
abstract: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has been associated with various sensory atypicalities across multiple domains. Interoception, the ability to detect and attend to internal bodily sensations, has been found to moderate the experience of body ownership, a known difference in ASD that may affect social function. However, interoception has not been empirically examined in ASD. In the current study, 45 children (21 with ASD and 24 controls) ages 8 to 17 years completed a heartbeat perception paradigm as a measure of interoceptive ability. A subset of these children also completed the rubber hand illusion task, a multisensory paradigm probing the malleability of perceived body ownership. Although the heartbeat perception paradigm yielded comparable interoceptive awareness (IA) overall across both groups, children with ASD were superior at mentally tracking their heartbeats over longer intervals, suggesting increased sustained attention to internal cues in ASD. In addition, IA was negatively correlated with rubber hand illusion susceptibility in both groups, supporting a previously demonstrated inverse relationship between internal awareness and one's ability to incorporate external stimuli into one's perception of self. We propose a trade-off between attention to internal cues and attention to external cues, whereby attentional resources are disproportionately allocated to internal, rather than external, sensory cues in ASD.
authors.affiliation: Department of Clinical and Social Sciences in Psychology, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627, USA.
authors.forename: Kimberly B
authors.initials: KB
authors.lastname: Schauder
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, TN 37212, USA.
authors.forename: Lisa E
authors.initials: LE
authors.lastname: Mash
authors.affiliation: Neuroscience Graduate Program, Vanderbilt Brain Institute, Nashville, TN 37232, USA.
authors.forename: Lauren K
authors.initials: LK
authors.lastname: Bryant
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, TN 37212, USA; Vanderbilt Kennedy Center, Nashville, TN 37203, USA. Electronic address: carissa.cascio@vanderbilt.edu.
authors.forename: Carissa J
authors.initials: CJ
authors.lastname: Cascio
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D001288:Attention; D001364:Awareness; D001828:Body Image / Q000523:psychology*; D002648:Child; D002659:Child Development Disorders, Pervasive / Q000523:psychology*; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006339:Heart Rate; D006801:Humans; D007088:Illusions / Q000523:psychology; D008297:Male; D012649:Self Concept; D014796:Visual Perception
keywords: Attention; Autism; Body awareness; Heartbeat detection; Interoception; Sensory processing