Giovanni Pezzulo

An active-inference theorist who enters the wiki through the experimental door rather than the theoretical one. Pezzulo’s programme, mostly co-authored with Friston, applies the free-energy principle to motivated control and homeostatic regulation — the question of how an organism acts to keep its physiological variables where they should be — which is the efferent, allostatic half of the picture the wiki usually meets through Seth (the perceptual/emotional half) or Stephan (the clinical/metacognitive half).

He is read first-hand here as senior/corresponding author of Iodice et al. (2019), the false-cardiac-feedback illusion of effort — a study whose whole logic is his framework’s: effort is an estimated physiological variable, so false interoceptive evidence should shift the estimate, and the asymmetry of the shift (priors resist being talked down) reflects the cost-sensitive character of regulation-serving inference.

Where he sits relative to the wiki’s other predictive theorists

The wiki’s predictive-coding thread has a division of labour that is worth keeping straight:

• Friston supplies the formalism (the free-energy principle, active-inference).
• Seth turns it inward onto emotion and the felt self (interoceptive-inference).
• Barrett turns it onto emotion as construction from a body budget.
• Stephan turns it onto psychopathology (allostatic self-efficacy, fatigue, depression).
• Pezzulo turns it onto action and motivated control — how the body is regulated by acting, not just how it is sensed — which is why his contribution to this wiki is a study about effort (an action-bound variable) rather than about affect.

His frequent co-author Laura Barca (also on the 2019 paper) works the cognitive-emotional-interaction side of the same programme (Pezzulo, Barca & Friston 2015).

Status of the page

Thin by design: only the one PNAS study is in raw/, and it is an experiment, not a theoretical statement, so the framework above is reconstructed from its citations rather than read first-hand. If a Pezzulo–Friston active-inference review enters the tree, this page should carry the primary account of active inference for regulation and control, which the wiki currently holds only through Petzschner’s sensory-control-loop and HRL material.