Researcher at a glance
- Affiliation: Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, National Research Council (ISTC-CNR), Rome
- Orientation: Active inference and the free-energy principle applied to homeostatic/allostatic regulation, motivated control, and embodied cognition; interoception as prediction and control of physiological variables
Key contributions
- Iodice et al. (2019), the false-heart-rate ‘illusion of effort’ — senior/corresponding author; the wiki’s first experimental interoceptive illusion of a homeostatic variable (Iodice et al. (2019)).
- Pezzulo, Rigoli & Friston (2015), ‘Active inference, homeostatic regulation and adaptive behavioural control’ — a statement of body regulation as active inference that underlies the effort-estimate framing of the 2019 study.
- Pezzulo, Rigoli & Friston (2018), ‘Hierarchical active inference: a theory of motivated control’ (TiCS) — motivation and goal-directed control cast in the active-inference hierarchy.
- Pezzulo (2014), ‘Why do you fear the bogeyman? An embodied predictive coding model of perceptual inference’ — an early embodied-predictive-coding model.
- Pezzulo & Cisek (2016), ‘Navigating the affordance landscape: feedback control as a process model of behavior and cognition’ (TiCS).
Key papers
- Iodice et al. (2019) — Iodice, Porciello, Bufalari, Barca & Pezzulo (2019), PNAS, doi:10.1073/pnas.1821032116.
- Pezzulo, G., Rigoli, F. & Friston, K. (2015). Active inference, homeostatic regulation and adaptive behavioural control. Prog. Neurobiol. 134, 17–35. (Not in raw/; known by citation.)
- Pezzulo, G., Rigoli, F. & Friston, K.J. (2018). Hierarchical active inference: a theory of motivated control. Trends Cogn. Sci. 22, 294–306. (Not in raw/.)
- Pezzulo, G., Barca, L. & Friston, K.J. (2015). Active inference and cognitive-emotional interactions in the brain. Behav. Brain Sci. 38, e85. (Not in raw/.)
Connections
- Debates: inferential?
- Related researchers: Karl J. Friston, Anil K. Seth, Manos Tsakiris, Klaas Enno Stephan, Lisa Feldman Barrett
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 The sensory-control loop and HRL material.