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Manipulating the Heart, Revealing the Mind: Cardiac Signal Processing Induced Self-Related Thought

Poster Session F - Tuesday, March 10, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Mai Sakuragi^1,2 (), Satoshi Umeda¹; ¹Keio University Department of Psychology, ²Japan Society for the Promotion of Science

We frequently experience mind-wandering (MW), in which our thoughts drift away from the task at hand. Previous studies have mainly focused on external factors, such as changes in the environment, as triggers of MW. However, approximately half of MW episodes cannot be explained by external causes, suggesting that unconscious processing of bodily signals may contribute to the spontaneous emergence of thought. To address this possibility, we investigated how individual differences in interoceptive accuracy (IA) and the neural processing of visceral signals relate to the occurrence and content of MW. IA was measured using the heartbeat counting task. We experimentally manipulated cardiac signal processing by randomly omitting heart-synchronous tones (cardiac-manipulation), which resulted in a significant heart-rate deceleration and enhanced heartbeat-evoked potentials (HEPs). Participants performed a simple attention task while heartbeats were manipulated and reported their ongoing thoughts using thought probes presented at random intervals. Results showed that participants with higher IA reported a greater frequency of self-related thoughts (i.e., past episodes and future plans) specifically during the cardiac-manipulation block. Moreover, higher IA was associated with a larger HEP amplitude during self-related thoughts, and this association was significantly enhanced under the cardiac-manipulation condition. These findings suggest that as individuals more precisely detect and neurally amplify cardiac signals, internally focused, self-referential thought is selectively facilitated. This provides a body-centric mechanism for the generation of MW content, indicating that the conscious experience of the self is fundamentally rooted in the processing of internal bodily states.

Topic Area: THINKING: Other