The Crash Analog Risk Task: A Pilot Paradigm for Studying Interoception and Risk-Taking

Interoception, the perception of internal bodily signals, has been proposed to influence decision-making through somatic markers that integrate physiological states into cognitive processes. Previous studies associate greater cardiac interoceptive accuracy with less risky decision-making. However, its influence on risk-taking under time pressure remains unclear. This study introduces the Crash Analog Risk Task (CART), a novel paradigm modeled after online Crash gambling games, to examine this relationship. Unlike established tasks such as the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), CART incorporates intrinsic time pressure through a continuously increasing reward multiplier that may crash at an uncertain point. We hypothesize that inducing attention to cardiac signals will increase risk aversion, leading to more conservative decisions in CART. In a randomized between-subjects design, university students were assigned to either an interoceptive Heartbeat Counting Task (HCT) or an exteroceptive control condition. Both groups subsequently completed the CART. A pilot study (N = 20) supported CART’s feasibility and showed descriptive differences in the predicted direction: the interoceptive group had lower average cashout multipliers, lower crash rates, and lower mean risk scores than the exteroceptive group, suggesting a possible link between interoceptive attention and more conservative risk-taking. However, larger studies with stronger time-pressure manipulation are needed.