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In the Body’s Eye: The Computational Anatomy of Interoceptive Inference

View ORCID ProfileMicah Allen, Andrew Levy, Thomas Parr, Karl J. Friston
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/603928
Micah Allen
1Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark
2Centre of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, Aarhus University Hospital, Denmark
3Cambridge Psychiatry, Cambridge University, Cambridge UK
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  • For correspondence: micah@cfin.au.dk
Andrew Levy
4Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, UCL
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Thomas Parr
4Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, UCL
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Karl J. Friston
4Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, UCL
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Abstract

A growing body of evidence highlights the intricate linkage of exteroceptive perception to the rhythmic activity of the visceral body. In parallel, interoceptive inference theories of emotion and self-consciousness are on the rise in cognitive science. However, thus far no formal theory has emerged to integrate these twin domains; instead most extant work is conceptual in nature. Here, we introduce a formal model of cardiac active inference, which explains how ascending cardiac signals entrain exteroceptive sensory perception and confidence. Through simulated psychophysics, we reproduce the defensive startle reflex and commonly reported effects linking the cardiac cycle to fear perception. We further show that simulated ‘interoceptive lesions’ blunt fear expectations, induce psychosomatic hallucinations, and exacerbate metacognitive biases. Through synthetic heart-rate variability analyses, we illustrate how the balance of arousal-priors and visceral prediction errors produces idiosyncratic patterns of physiological reactivity. Our model thus offers the possibility to computationally phenotype disordered brain-body interaction.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.
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Posted April 10, 2019.
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In the Body’s Eye: The Computational Anatomy of Interoceptive Inference
Micah Allen, Andrew Levy, Thomas Parr, Karl J. Friston
bioRxiv 603928; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/603928
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In the Body’s Eye: The Computational Anatomy of Interoceptive Inference
Micah Allen, Andrew Levy, Thomas Parr, Karl J. Friston
bioRxiv 603928; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/603928

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