On the Validity of Heartbeat Tracking Tasks

Abstract

ABSTRACT We attempted to test the hypothetical involvement of gender, cerebral laterality, and repeated trials in the performance of a heartbeat tracking task similar to ones previously reported. Subjects were told to press a key in synchrony with their heartbeats or with counter clicks for 250 trials with each hand. Key presses were sorted into six 100‐ms bins following each R‐wave; so, unlike previous heartbeat tracking studies which simply looked for similar rate properties of key press and heartbeat latencies, we sought congruence between the two distributions. No evidence of nonrandom key pressing could be adduced while subjects attempted to track heartbeats; whereas subjects did display nonrandom key presses with respect to heart driven counter clicks. It is concluded that such heartbeat tracking procedures are unsuited to assess cardiac perception, much less to detect any presumed correlate of such perception.