Researcher at a glance
- Affiliation: Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London; Department of Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences, University of Luxembourg
- Orientation: Predictive/multisensory accounts of the bodily self; interoceptive contributions to body ownership and self-other boundaries; the social origins of interoceptive inference
Key contributions
- Tsakiris et al. (2011), ‘Just a heartbeat away from one’s body’: lower interoceptive sensitivity predicts greater malleability of body representations in the rubber hand illusion — the wiki’s founding result for interoception as a precision term in bodily self-representation.
- With Fotopoulou, ‘Mentalizing homeostasis’ (2017): the proposal that interoceptive inference has social origins, because an infant cannot disambiguate its own interoceptive causes by acting and requires a caregiver to do the inferring.
- With Seth, ‘Being a beast machine: the somatic basis of selfhood’ (2018) — the predictive-processing statement of the visceral self.
- With Apps, ‘the free-energy self’: self-representation as a generative model spanning interoceptive and exteroceptive domains.
- Programme of work on interoception and self-other boundaries, self-objectification, self-face recognition, and the modulation of social cognition (including racial stereotype expression) by cardiac afferent timing.
Key papers
- Quigley et al. (2021) — Quigley, Kanoski, Grill, Barrett & Tsakiris (2021), Trends in Neurosciences 44(1):29-38 (the ‘sense of self’ section is his).
- Tsakiris, M., Tajadura-Jimenez, A. & Costantini, M. (2011). Just a heartbeat away from one’s body: interoceptive sensitivity predicts malleability of body-representations. Proc. Biol. Sci. 278, 2470-2476. (Not in raw/; load-bearing across four wiki pages.)
- Fotopoulou, A. & Tsakiris, M. (2017). Mentalizing homeostasis: the social origins of interoceptive inference. Neuropsychoanalysis 19, 3-28. (Not in raw/; the theoretical source of Social origins of interoception.)
- Seth, A. K. & Tsakiris, M. (2018). Being a beast machine: the somatic basis of selfhood. Trends Cogn. Sci. 22, 969-981. (Not in raw/.)
- Tsakiris, M. (2017). The multisensory basis of the self: from body to identity to others. Q. J. Exp. Psychol. 70, 597-609.
Connections
The wiki has been running on Tsakiris’s results since its early ingests without a page for him. Three of them are load-bearing:
- Tsakiris et al. (2011) — lower Interoceptive sensitivity predicts greater RHI susceptibility — appears on Experience of body ownership (EBO), Rubber hand illusion (RHI), Interoceptive sensitivity and now Multisensory integration. It is the wiki’s founding evidence that interoceptive precision competes with exteroceptive input in constituting the bodily self.
- Fotopoulou & Tsakiris (2017), “mentalizing homeostasis,” is the theoretical source of Social origins of interoception — cited by Oldroyd et al., by Bonaz et al., and now by Tsakiris himself in Quigley et al. (2021). Three independent wiki sources route to one unread paper.
- Apps & Tsakiris, “the free-energy self,” is the framing Seth (2013) adopts for Embodied selfhood.
He is read first-hand at last through the “sense of self” section of Quigley et al. (2021).
His malleability hypothesis, tested on a new illusion, fails for self-report
Iodice et al. (2019) built their illusion of effort as an explicit extension of Tsakiris’s programme, and took his signature moderation as an a priori prediction: since low interoceptive sensitivity predicts greater RHI (Tsakiris et al. 2011) and enfacement (Tajadura-Jiménez & Tsakiris 2014) susceptibility, people low in interoceptive awareness should show a stronger illusion of effort. It did not appear — MAIA Noticing and Body Listening were uncorrelated with illusion magnitude.
This is a soft, not a hard, disconfirmation, and the difference is the measure: Tsakiris’s malleability results used an objective heartbeat task (the Mental Tracking Task), while Iodice et al. used the MAIA, a self-report sensibility instrument — and the wiki’s own sources (Banellis, Ventura-Bort) show accuracy and sensibility do not correspond. Iodice et al. concede this and flag objective accuracy against the illusion as untested. So the null qualifies how generally his precision-competition account travels — it holds for objectively-measured cardiac precision in body-ownership illusions, and is unshown for self-reported sensibility in a homeostatic illusion — rather than refuting it. See Is more interoceptive awareness better?.
Position
Tsakiris’s route into interoception is from the outside in, and this matters for how the wiki reads him. He came from the exteroceptive multisensory literature — the RHI, visuo-tactile integration, mirror self-recognition, the enfacement illusion — where selfhood looked “highly malleable and subject to the perception of the body from the outside.” His contribution is the argument that this picture is incomplete because it left out the viscera, and that what fixes the malleability is interoceptive precision.
That is a different starting point from every other self-theorist in the wiki. Craig starts from an afferent pathway and builds the material me upward. Seth starts from a computational principle and applies it inward. Damasio starts from the feeling of what happens. Tsakiris starts from an illusion that works, asks why it works better in some people, and finds the answer in the body they can feel.
What he says about his own claim’s status
Worth recording, because it is more cautious than the wiki’s secondary sources are on his behalf. In the Quigley et al. review he writes that “questions of when and how interoceptive awareness emerges in early life remain unexplored,” that the relevant measures are limited-range and especially so in children, and that researchers “can now begin to test” the hypotheses about the social origins of interoceptive awareness. The originator of the social-origins claim describes it as untested. See Are the origins of interoception social or biological?, where Oldroyd et al. state the strong version (“social not biological”) that Tsakiris’s own framing does not commit to.