Exposure to false cardiac feedback alters pain perception and anticipatory cardiac frequency

The experience of pain, like other interoceptive processes, has recently been conceptualized in terms of predictive coding and free energy frameworks. In these views, the brain integrates sensory, proprioceptive, and interoceptive signals to generate probabilistic inferences about upcoming events, which shape both the state and the perception of our inner body. Here, we ask whether it is possible to induce pain expectations by providing false faster (vs. slower) acoustic cardiac feedback before administering electrical cutaneous shocks. We test whether these expectations will shape both the perception of pain and the body's physiological state toward prior predictions. Results confirmed that faster cardiac feedback elicited pain expectations that affected both perceptual pain judgments and the body's physiological response. Perceptual pain judgments were biased toward the expected level of pain, such that participants illusorily perceived identical noxious stimuli as more intense and unpleasant. Physiological changes mirrored the predicted level of pain, such that participants' actual cardiac response in anticipation of pain stimuli showed a deceleration in heart rate, in line with the well-known orienting cardiac response in anticipation of threatening stimuli (Experiment 1). In a control experiment, such perceptual and cardiac modulations were dramatically reduced when the feedback reproduced an exteroceptive, instead of interoceptive, cardiac feedback (Experiment 2). These findings show that cardiac perception can be understood as interoceptive inference that modulates both our perception and the physiological state of the body, thereby actively generating the interoceptive and autonomic consequences that have been predicted.