Extending predictive processing to the body: emotion as interoceptive inference

Abstract

The Bayesian brain hypothesis provides an attractive unifying framework for perception, cognition, and action. We argue that the framework can also usefully integrate interoception, the sense of the internal physiological condition of the body. Our model of "interoceptive predictive coding" entails a new view of emotion as interoceptive inference and may account for a range of psychiatric disorders of selfhood.