Interoceptive Attention and Perspective-Taking in a Relationship with Dispositional Mindfulness

Mindfulness as well as embodiment and interoception have received major attention in various psychological studies lately. However, they were mostly studied separately with only a few attempts to align these constructs. The present study explores the effects of interoceptive and exteroceptive attention on the embodied process of visuo-spatial perspective-taking in a relationship with dispositional mindfulness. Unlike previous research on this topic, in the present experiment, interoceptive attention is focused on the motor rather than the cardiac system, since it is more closely associated with the embodiment of perspective-taking. Moreover, a previous study has discovered that concentrating attention on the heartbeat was perceived to be much more difficult compared to the exteroceptive attention task. Therefore, the new potential manipulation for interoceptive attention, called the muscle tension, was applied in the experiment. It is derived from classical mindfulness practice “body scan” plus progressive muscle relaxation technique and is more related to the whole-body movement. The final sample is 122 participantans with mean age of 20,58, mostly students of Tilburg Universtity. We expect that participants in the interoceptive condition have an advantage, because they are more attentive to the body and the visuo-spatial perspective-taking has to do with the whole-body schema movement, and therefore we predict a two-way interaction and also moderation by dispositional mindfulness. We find the opposite and moderation by dispositional mindfulness. The mindful participants in the exteroceptive condition are generally faster at visuo-spatial perspective-taking. Keywords: Interoception, interoceptive attention, exteroceptive attention, embodied cognition, dispositional mindfulness, visuo-spatial perspective-taking.