A Falsifiable Framework Integrating Embodied Cognition, Interoception, Predictive Processing, Neurovisceral Regulation, and Sensorimotor Grounding

Daphne Garrido

Independent Researcher

Preprint · Version 1.0 · September 2026 - Available on Zenodo

Status: Not peer reviewed. This manuscript synthesizes peer-reviewed and foundational literature and proposes a testable theoretical construct.

Suggested citation: Garrido, D. (2026). Toward a Science of Full-Body Intelligence: A Falsifiable Framework Integrating Embodied Cognition, Interoception, Predictive Processing, Neurovisceral Regulation, and Sensorimotor Grounding [Preprint].

Toward a Science of Full Body Intelligence.pdf

Abstract

Embodied-cognition research increasingly challenges descriptions of cognition as an exclusively brain-bounded process. Interoception, autonomic regulation, visceral-neural coupling, sensorimotor grounding, predictive processing, and allostasis each show that cognition and adaptive behavior depend on recurrent interactions among neural activity, bodily state, action, and environment. Yet these literatures are commonly studied in isolation.

This paper proposes full-body intelligence as a falsifiable, organism-level construct intended to organize—not replace—these established research programs. Full-body intelligence is defined here as a multidimensional capacity arising from dynamic coupling among interoceptive, autonomic, sensorimotor, neuroendocrine, neural, and environmental processes through which an organism predicts, regulates, acts, adapts, and recovers across multiple timescales.

The construct does not imply that every tissue is cognitive, that cognition is uniformly distributed through the body, or that neural computation is dispensable. Instead, it predicts that some forms of cognitive performance and adaptive self-regulation depend on closed-loop brain-body dynamics that cannot be adequately characterized by brain activity considered in isolation.

Five candidate dimensions are advanced:

• Interoceptive discrimination and metacognitive calibration.
• Adaptive autonomic and cardiorespiratory regulation.
• Flexible interoceptive-exteroceptive precision weighting.
• Recovery and adaptive reorganization after perturbation.
• Pre-stimulus physiological differentiation, retained as an explicitly exploratory dimension.

An evidence hierarchy distinguishes convergent empirical findings from supported theoretical models, integrative hypotheses, contested findings, and long-horizon extrapolations. The framework yields direct disconfirmation criteria and a prospective multimodal research program.