How do individual differences in interoception influence navigation in virtual and real environments?

The possible impact of the interindividual variability in interoception on human navigation remains unexplored. However, recent theories suggest that interoceptive inputs are essential for cognition, and evolutionary perspectives link navigation to interoceptive processing related to energy regulation. Building on this evidence, we present three studies on healthy volunteers aimed at exploring whether individual differences in conscious interoceptive dimensions (interoceptive sensibility, accuracy, and awareness) predict individual differences in spatial knowledge of both virtual (Studies 1 and 2) and real-world (Study 3) environments. Study 1 was a web-based study in which 142 participants completed an interoceptive sensibility (ISe) questionnaire and three tasks probing route, landmark, and survey knowledge of an environment acquired from a video presentation. No significant relationship was found between ISe and environmental knowledge, as assessed using virtual navigation tasks. Study 2 extends Study 1 by exploring other relevant interoceptive dimensions, specifically interoceptive accuracy (IAcc) and awareness (IAw), in a laboratory-based setting. In this study, 110 participants completed an ISe questionnaire and the Heartbeat Counting Task to measure IAcc and IAw, as well as desktop-based tasks probing landmark, route, and survey knowledge of a virtual environment. Results from this study provided some indication that higher IAcc could be linked to slower performance in the landmark task. Study 3 moves from a virtual to a real-world environment. A total of 45 participants completed the IAcc, IAw, and ISe measures, as well as tasks that probed landmark, route, and survey knowledge of a real environment and involved first-person, actual navigation. The results suggest a possible link between higher IAcc and better performance in the route and survey tasks. These findings offer new empirical evidence on the relationship between interoception and environmental navigation. Tentatively, while heightened IAcc might impair attention to external cues (landmarks), at least in virtual environments (Study 2), it could enhance real-world navigational tasks of enviroments that have been directly explored from an egocentric perspective (Study 3). However, these findings should be interpreted with caution, as the overall association across studies was weak, and warrant replication in future studies using additional measures of both interoception and navigation.