# Development of a lifespan monkey model of interoception

> **NIH NIH R21** · UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT DAVIS · 2023 · $433,950

## Abstract

Project Summary
Decades of correlational research have revealed that a person’s ability to integrate physiological information
from the body and sense or experience those physiological signals, a process known as interoception, is critical
to health and deteriorates across the lifespan, even in healthy aging. Understanding the mechanisms that
mediate interoceptive processes is therefore critical for developing treatments and interventions for a broad array
of interoception-related diseases and aging-related processes. Such mechanistic investigations require the
capacity to causally manipulate potential neurobiological and environmental substrates of interoception, which
necessarily requires an animal model. In the proposed work, we develop a highly translatable animal model of
interoception by developing a behavioral task to evaluate cardiac interoceptive ability in rhesus monkeys
(Macaca mulatta) and then by developing a behavioral task that indexes the extent to which monkeys use cardiac
interoceptive signals to guide affect-related cognition. We also examine how individual variation in cardiac
function relates to variation in interoceptive ability to establish functional homologies between monkeys and
humans. This innovative work will be the first to use a translatable measurement of cardiac interoceptive ability
in nonhuman animals and sets the stage for further mechanistic investigations to understand how and why
interoception changes across the lifespan and in a variety of diseases ranging from mood disorders to
neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s disease. Ultimately, understanding the biological mechanisms of
interoception is necessary to develop treatments and interventions for interoception-related diseases and to
promote wellbeing across the lifespan.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10742545
- **Project number:** 1R21AG080198-01A1
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT DAVIS
- **Principal Investigator:** Eliza Bliss-Moreau
- **Activity code:** R21 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2023
- **Award amount:** $433,950
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2023-09-01 → 2025-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10742545

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10742545, Development of a lifespan monkey model of interoception (1R21AG080198-01A1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-25 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10742545. Licensed CC0.

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