Language, Cognition, Emotion and mental health
Our research focuses on the embodied and interoceptive foundations of cognitive and emotional processes, in both healthy individuals and psychopathological conditions. We investigate how bodily, sensorimotor, interoceptive, affective, and contextual information is integrated to support cognition, emotion, and adaptive behaviour.
Our work is grounded in embodied cognition, Predictive Processing, and Active Inference frameworks. We combine experimental and computational approaches with behavioural, kinematic, psychophysiological, and virtual-reality methods.
Keywords: embodied cognition; interoception; sensorimotor processes; predictive processing; active inference; cognitive and affective sciences; mental health; concepts; language.
Our current topics include:
i) Embodied and interoceptive grounding of concepts and language
We investigate how conceptual knowledge is grounded in sensorimotor, interoceptive, linguistic, and social experience. Our research examines the acquisition, processing, and representation of different types of concepts, including abstract, concrete, and emotional concepts, and how their organization may vary across bodily states and individual differences. We use behavioural and process-sensitive methods, including categorization, self-report, and mouse-tracking paradigms, to characterize the contribution of bodily and sensorimotor information to conceptual processing.
ii) Interoception, Predictive Processing, and mental health.
Within Predictive Processing and Active Inference frameworks, we investigate how interoceptive, sensorimotor, affective, and contextual information contributes to bodily and emotional experience and adaptive regulation. We are particularly interested in the flexible weighting of bodily and contextual information, prediction errors, and individual differences in these processes. We also investigate how alterations in interoceptive and predictive processes may contribute to psychopathological and nocebo-like bodily experiences, using behavioural, psychophysiological, virtual-reality, and computational approaches.
Research Fellow: Salvatore Manuel Diana
Trainees: Arianna Gentile, Margherita Petrocelli
