The growth and behavior of higher organisms depend on the accurate perception and integration of sensory stimuli by the nervous system. We show that defects in sensory perception in C. elegans result in abnormalities in the growth of the animal and in the expression of alternative behavioral states. Our analysis suggests that sensory neurons modulate neural or neuroendocrine functions, regulati...

Findings in the social psychology literatures on attitudes, social perception, and emotion demonstrate that social information processing involves embodiment, where embodiment refers both to actual bodily states and to simulations of experience in the brain's modality-specific systems for perception, action, and introspection. We show that embodiment underlies social information processing when...

Patients with cortical blindness can reliably perceive some facial expressions even if they are unaware of their percept. We examined whether emotional body language may also be recognized in the absence of the primary visual cortex and without conscious stimulus perception. We presented emotional and neutral body images in the blind field of a patient with unilateral striate cortex damage. Usi...

Perception is seen as a process that utilises partial and noisy information to construct a coherent understanding of the world. Here we argue that the experience of pain is no different; it is based on incomplete, multimodal information, which is used to estimate potential bodily threat. We outline a Bayesian inference model, incorporating the key components of cue combination, causal inference...

The main idea of this book is that perceiving is a way of acting. Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us. It is something we do. Think of a blind person taptapping his or her way around a cluttered space, perceiving that space by touch, not all at once, but through time, by skillful probing and movement. This is, or at least ought to be, our paradigm of what perceiving is. The...

Sensitivity to signals arising within the body (interoceptive awareness) has been implicated in emotion processing; interindividual differences in interoceptive awareness modulate both subjective and physiological indicators of emotional experience and the regulation of emotion-related behaviors. This study investigated interoceptive awareness in patients with fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS), a chr...

Common physical symptoms such as abdominal pain, headache, back pain and dizziness play a major role for the health care system. Existing models for the development and maintenance of these symptoms emphasize a vicious circle with cognitive-perceptual, behavioral, and psychobiological components. In this manuscript, we present examples of psychobiological factors that might contribute to somato...

Music performance is closely associated with body movements in many levels for both the instrument player and the listener. Recent studies show the existence of a strong link between bodily movement and conception and perception of music. The MvM (Music via Motion) framework was proposed over 10 years ago now and has been designed for several different scenarios including interactive dance perf...