Daphne Garrido
Preprint · Version 1.0 · September 2026 - Preprint on Zenodo
Status: Not peer reviewed. Methods, protocol, and research-framework paper.
Series: The Human Embodied Intelligence Research Program · Preprint 4
Operationalizing Full Body Intelligence.pdf
Full-body intelligence (FBI) has been proposed as a falsifiable organism-level construct arising from dynamic interactions among interoceptive, autonomic, sensorimotor, neural, neuroendocrine, and environmental processes. The central empirical problem is now measurement: established physiological and cognitive measures do not become validated measures of FBI merely by being assembled into a battery.
This paper therefore specifies a prospective multimodal framework for testing whether candidate dimensions form reproducible, incrementally predictive patterns under controlled perturbation.
The framework prioritizes four core candidate domains:
Heartbeat-evoked potentials and cortical-autonomic coupling are treated as candidate neural measures requiring stringent artifact control and reliability assessment. Anticipatory physiological activity, examined separately in Preprint 3, is retained only as an optional exploratory module and is excluded from the primary construct score unless independently confirmed.
The proposed program uses baseline phenotyping, standardized perturbations, repeated measurement, multimodal physiology, preregistration, multilevel modeling, latent-variable analysis, cross-validation, measurement-invariance tests, and independent multi-site replication.
The principal validation question is not whether individual component measures show expected effects, but whether a higher-order FBI model demonstrates reliability, discriminant validity, incremental prediction, and replicability beyond its component processes.
Failure to identify such a construct is an informative outcome and would favor a multidimensional profile or component-process account over a unitary higher-order construct.