Body Influences on Social Cognition Through Interoception.

Abstract

From the dichotomy of body and mind to embodied cognition, the body as a material entity has become increasingly important in the cognitive development of individuals. Embodied cognition strengthens the current view that the body plays an essential role in cognition. For example, regarding the influence of body anatomy on cognition, if we replace human eyes with a bat's echolocation system, we will perceive the world in a completely different way (Goldman and de Vignemont, 2009). The impact of bodily activity on cognition is illustrated by better word memory and mathematical problem solving resulting from the use of hand gestures (Macedonia, 2014; Cook et al., 2017). The influence of bodily content and bodily format on cognition is shown when participants who reviewed resumes with heavy clipboards rather than light clipboards believed a candidate was more serious and had a better overall evaluation of that candidate (Ackerman et al., 2010). Regrettably, these studies focus on the causal effects of the body on cognition and ignore the influence of the internal state of the body on cognitive processing. Body ownership is a fundamental dimension of the bodily self which refers to the feeling that my body belongs to me, and the experience of body ownership is moderated by interindividual differences in the sensitivity to stimuli originating inside of the body, that is, by interoception (Schauder et al., 2015; Chen et al., 2017). It has been proposed that interoception also can moderate embodiments (Hafner, 2013). Interoception refers to the perception of internal body states; it is the intermediary between body and cognition. Several studies have demonstrated that interoception plays an important role in implicit memory processes and intuitive decision making (Dunn et al., 2010; Werner et al., 2010). Therefore, an “embodied sense of self” or “sense of embodiment” can become a new indicator of embodied cognition (Kilteni et al., 2012). Social cognition is “a sub-topic of social psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in social interactions” (Park et al., 2015). To date, an embodiment perspective has motivated novel insights about the understanding of others' minds (Wilson and Foglia, 2017), but how the body affects social cognition is still unclear. In this paper, we provide evidence that the body influences one's social cognition through interoception. Interoception, as first proposed by Sherrington in 1906, originally only was referred to as visceroception (such as heart rate, breath, and hunger, etc.), and it did not include organs like the brain and skin (Tsakiris, 2017). It now refers to the ability to detect the feelings of internal bodily sensations, including proprioception (signals from the skin and musculoskeletal apparatus) and visceroception (Herbert and Pollatos, 2012; Schauder et al., 2015; Pollatos et al., 2016). Activation of interoceptive representations and meta-representations of bodily signals supporting interoceptive awareness are closely related to emotional experience and cognitive functions (Herbert and Pollatos, 2012). In this paper, we first explore interoception in general, review studies about proprioception and visceroception, and discuss the related brain regions. Thereafter, we summarize the relevant studies showing the association of social cognition with interoception in Table 1. Since the core components of social cognition are still the subject of some debate, we focus here on the traditionally associated processes: theory of mind (ToM), empathy, and imitation (Happe et al., 2017). Finally, we suggest that improving the sensitivity or accuracy of interoception can enhance one's ability to understand the mental state of others, thereby enabling better social communication. Table 1 Relevant studies showing the association of social cognition with interoception.