The Bodily Self

Social cues, even minimal ones like the mere presence of another person, can reduce how accurately people perceive their own heartbeat. In a virtual reality environment, 32 healthy adults performed a heartbeat counting task while exposed to either social or non-social visual cues. Accuracy was lower in the social condition, suggesting that attention shifts between internal bodily signals and external social information. This supports the idea that the sense of self is shaped by social context. The findings also raise methodological concerns for interoception research and may inform studies of conditions involving altered social and bodily awareness.

Study at a glance

Abstract

The embodied self emerges from dynamic interactions between internal bodily signals and external sensory inputs, including those of social origin. Interoception (the perception and interpretation of internal bodily states) plays a central role in bodily self-consciousness and social cognition. Although socially salient contexts have been shown to modulate interoceptive accuracy (IAcc), the influence of passive social presence remains largely unexplored. In this study, we examined how the social exteroception modulates cardiac interoceptive accuracy using a heartbeat counting task in a Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE). Neurologically healthy participants (N = 32; ages 19-45) completed the task under both social and non-social exteroceptive conditions. Results showed that the mere presence of social exteroceptive cues significantly decreased IAcc. These findings indicate that even minimal social cues can influence internal bodily awareness, supporting the view that the embodied self is inherently relational and dynamically influenced by its social environment. This effect may reflect attentional competition between interoceptive and exteroceptive processes, consistent with predictive coding and attentional switching models. By leveraging immersive virtual reality, we created ecologically valid yet precisely controlled social contexts, minimizing the confounds of real-life physiological coregulation. Beyond theoretical implications, this study raises methodological considerations regarding the potential influence of social context, including experimenter presence, on interoceptive performance, and may inform clinical research on mental health conditions characterized by altered interoceptive and social processing.