Interoception, or the sense of the internal state of the body, is hypothesized to be essential for a wide range of psychobiological processes and the development and perpetuation of several (mental) health problems. However, the study of interoceptive accuracy, the objectively measured capacity to detect or discriminate conscious bodily signals, has been hampered by the use of tasks with questionable construct validity and is often limited to studying interoception solely in the cardiac domain. We developed a novel task to measure interoceptive accuracy in the respiratory domain, the respiratory occlusion discrimination (ROD) task. In this task, interoceptive accuracy is defined as an individual’s ability to detect small differences in lengths of short respiratory occlusions, assessed by means of an adaptive staircase procedure. This article describes a validation study (N = 97) aimed at investigating the internal consistency, test‐retest reliability, and discriminant validity of the ROD task. The average just noticeable difference of lengths of respiratory occlusion was 74.22 ms, with large inter‐individual variability (SD = 37.1 ms). The results of the validation study indicate acceptable internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = 0.70), 1‐week test‐retest reliability (r = 0.53), and discriminant validity, as indicated by a lack of correlation between the ROD task and an auditory discrimination task with identical design (r = 0.18), and a weak correlation with breathing behavior (r = −0.27). The ROD task is a promising novel paradigm to study interoceptive accuracy and its role in various psychobiological processes and disorders.

中文翻译：

---

呼吸阻塞判别任务：测量呼吸内感受准确度的新范式

内感受，或身体内部状态的感觉，被假设为对广泛的心理生物学过程以及几种（心理）健康问题的发展和持续至关重要。然而，对内感受准确性的研究，客观测量的检测或区分有意识的身体信号的能力，受到使用具有可疑结构有效性的任务的阻碍，并且通常仅限于仅在心脏领域研究内感受。我们开发了一项新任务来测量呼吸领域的内感受准确度，即呼吸阻塞鉴别 (ROD) 任务。在这项任务中，内感受准确度被定义为个人检测短呼吸阻塞长度的微小差异的能力，通过自适应阶梯程序进行评估。N  = 97) 旨在调查 ROD 任务的内部一致性、重测信度和区分效度。呼吸阻塞长度的平均刚好显着差异为 74.22 ms，具有较大的个体差异（SD  = 37.1 ms）。验证研究的结果表明可接受的内部一致性（Cronbach's alpha = 0.70）、1 周重测信度（r  = 0.53）和区分效度，如 ROD 任务和听觉辨别任务之间缺乏相关性所表明的具有相同的设计 ( r  = 0.18)，并且与呼吸行为的相关性较弱 ( r= -0.27)。ROD 任务是一种很有前途的新范式，用于研究内感受的准确性及其在各种心理生物学过程和障碍中的作用。