Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Lately there has been an increase in work on the role that interoception can play in motivating action. Given that research programs such as the ecological approach have an action-oriented account of perceptual content that has proved successful for explain a host of psychological phenomena, one would expect there to be work caching out interoceptive content in ecological terms. But little work has been done exploring interoception from the perspective of the ecological approach. Here I will attempt to remedy that by showing just how we can conceive of interoception as perception of action possibilities. More precisely, I will argue that in interoception what we perceive are affordances. And then I will attempt to develop an account of interceptive affordances which conceives of them as action possibilities an agent can take to regulate internal bodily processes.