Micah G. Allen

@micahgallen.com

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Professor of Computational Neuroscience and Psychiatry, Aarhus University. PI @ the Embodied Computation Group. We study perception, interoception, & metacogniton. https://www.the-ecg.org

Graphical abstract showing four panels. Panel 1: a person in an MRI scanner with blue cognitive thought bubbles drifting from their head and pink body thought bubbles from their torso, with organs glowing inside. Panel 2: blue bubbles for cognitive items (Self, Words, Focus, Images, Future, Past) are larger than pink bubbles for body items (Breathing, Movement, Stomach, Heart, Skin, Bladder), with arrows showing body thoughts link to more negative and less positive emotion. Panel 3: physiological traces (EGG, ECG, respiratory) show higher arousal with body-wandering; a bar chart shows cognitive items (Past, Future, Repetitive, Vivid) correlate with more ADHD and depression symptoms while body items (Breath, Stomach, Skin, Heart) correlate with fewer. Panel 4: medial brain with thalamus, somatomotor cortex, and interoceptive regions highlighted, plus a chord diagram showing connectivity between these three regions.
⏺ Graphical abstract for the MetaBites study. Three-panel layout flowing left to right. Left panel poses the research question: why does nutritional knowledge fail to predict dietary behaviour, testing caloric density versus nutritional quality (NRF 9.3). Centre panel shows the MetaBites task: a two-alternative forced-choice between two food plates with a confidence slider, measuring sensitivity, confidence, and familiarity ratings in 32 participants across 300 trials. Right panel presents key findings: a faceted bar chart showing higher sensitivity for nutritional quality judgements (d'=1.19 vs 1.10) but higher confidence for calorie judgements (68.2 vs 65.2); overlapping M-ratio distributions confirming higher metacognitive efficiency for calories (1.03) than NRF (0.80); and a familiarity bias diagram showing familiar foods are judged as more nutritious and less caloric. Conclusion states that a familiarity heuristic may partially explain why metacognitive insight for nutrition lags behind calories.
Graphical abstract showing three panels. Left panel, "Multiorgan Interoception Measures," depicts a translucent human body silhouette with anatomically rendered heart (red) and lungs (blue), accompanied by schematic icons for three psychophysical tasks: the Respiratory Resistance Sensitivity Task (RRST), Heart Rate Discrimination Task (HRDT), and an auditory control condition. N = 241 participants. Center panel, "Psychophysical Modelling and Individual Differences," shows a fan of overlapping sigmoid psychometric curves in blue-to-red gradient representing individual variation in perceptual threshold (α) and precision (β), a hierarchical Bayesian model diagram, and icons for metacognitive bias and M-Ratio efficiency. Right panel, "Key Finding: No Cross-Modal Relationship," displays a scatterplot of cardiac versus respiratory sensitivity with a flat regression line (r ≈ 0, BF₀₁ > 6), a compact Bayes Factor heatmap with mostly blue null-supporting cells and one orange cell indicating that subjective confidence is shared across modalities (r = 0.51***). Takeaway: interoceptive ability is modality-specific.
A figure shwoing boxplots.
Figure 1: One half the original size. The top record represents intragastric pressure (the small oscillations due to respiration, the large to contractions of the stomach); the second record is time in minutes (ten minutes); the third record is W’s report of hunger pangs; the lowest record is respiration registered by means of a pneumonraph about the abdomen.