Scientists from Royal Holloway, University of London have found that babies as young as five months are sensitive to their own heartbeats. The research could pave the way to better understanding disorders such as anxiety, depression and autism.
The study, published today in eLife, explains how researchers created a novel experiment to test the awareness of babies to their bodies’ internal signals. The ability to consciously sense signals from your body is called interoception, and some people are more aware of these signals than others. These differences between people can influence a wide range of psychological processes, including how strongly you feel emotions, your decision making and mental health.
“Understanding when we start to be aware of internal signals and how this ability differs among people is really important,” said Professor Manos Tsakiris from the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway. “Despite the fact we know that this type of awareness plays a crucial role in cognition in adulthood, we know practically nothing about its early developmental origins. How and when does this ability develop? And how does it influence who we are as adults?”
By creating a new test called the Infant Heartbeat Task (iBEAT), the researchers measured this ability for the first time, and found that babies as young as five months old are able to sense their own heartbeats.
"If you get butterflies before a speech, or feel your heart thumping in your chest when you’re scared, you’re using a skill called interoception,” explains Dr Lara Maister, also at Royal Holloway and the Warburg Institute at the School of Advanced Study. “We created a new experiment to see if young children use interoception in order to assess when these skills develop.”
Historically, understanding how babies process internal signals has been difficult; until now, there has been no way to measure interoception in infants. Using the iBEAT test, the researchers measured whether infants could discriminate between an animated character moving in synchrony or out of synchrony with their own heartbeat. Infants preferred to watch the character that was moving out of synchrony, suggesting that even at this early age, they are sensitive to their own interoceptive signals.
The test also showed that some babies were more sensitive to their heartbeats than others. Measuring the infants’ brain activity, the researchers saw that those who had shown a strong preference in the iBEATS task also showed a larger brain signal known as the Heart-Evoked Potential (or HEP) that reflects how our brains process signals from the heart. This special interoceptive brain signal got stronger when babies saw people making negative facial expressions such as fear and anger. This suggests that the way babies experience emotions might be closely linked to their bodies’ responses.
It is now possible that by using this test and following babies as they get older, researchers will be able to track how awareness of internal bodily signals changes as we age to support self-awareness and emotional and cognitive development, and how these processes impact on mental health as we grow up.
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eLife is a unique collaboration between the funders and practitioners of research to improve the way important research is selected, presented and shared. eLife publishes outstanding works across the life sciences and biomedicine – from basic biological research to applied, translational and clinical studies. All papers are selected by active scientists in the research community. Decisions and responses are agreed by the reviewers and consolidated by the Reviewing Editor into a single, clear set of instructions for authors, removing the need for laborious cycles of revision and allowing authors to publish their findings quickly. eLife is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust. Learn more at elifesciences.org.
