Six Challenges for a Mechanistic Science of Human Interoception

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Human interoception has become a major focus of systems, cognitive, and clinical neuroscience. Work across the past decade has shown that signals originating within the body shape perception, emotion, cognition, behavior, and health. Despite rapid methodological and conceptual progress, which substantially expanded our understanding of how bodily signals are processed and represented, much of the field remains constrained by descriptive methods. As these approaches passively assess bodily signals or subjective awareness, they have limited ability to establish causal mechanisms or translate interoceptive findings into clinically informative frameworks. Here, we identify six challenges and corresponding methodological directions for advancing human interoception research: strengthening integration of animal and human models, developing causal perturbation paradigms, capturing interoception in ecologically valid contexts, standardizing multidimensional measurement across bodily systems, adjudicating between computational accounts, and translating mechanistic insights into clinically informative models of health and disease. These challenges are best understood as linked requirements for moving interoception research from relevance to mechanism. Together, they highlight the need to move beyond predominantly static, passive, and single-modality approaches toward studies that can test how internal bodily signals relate to neural activity, behavior, and health.