The Body as a Source of Evidence (BoSE): Characterizing dysfunctional interoception in Anorexia Nervosa

The overarching goal of BoSE is to study interoceptive processes - which is the sense of the internal state of the body - and in understanding how disorders of interoception may cause psychopathological conditions. The project starts from a predictive processing view of interoception, according to which interoception results from an inferential process, which integrates top-down interoceptive predictions about the internal state of the body with bottom-up bodily and visceral sensations. Crucially for our proposal, a correct interoceptive inference must always remain flexible: It has to consider all the available information in proportion to their relative reliability, and, for example flexibly change its predictions in light of novel sensory evidence. On the contrary, if, for example, prior beliefs dominate the inference and are not updateted appropriately the inferential process becomes rigid and it can result in misregulations and psychopathological conditions.

The project will probe a crucial characteristic of interoception: its flexibility in learning interoceptive priors and integrating them within the inferential process, in normotipycal population and patients with Anorexia Nervosa, suggested to be characterized by reduced interoceptive sensory precision. BoSE will combine empirical behavioral studies, physiological measurements, virtual reality and computational models of brain functions to - empirically and formally - unravel some of the mechanisms underlying its striking features (i.e., Body Image Distortion -BDI).