Bodily Rhythms Gate Action–Perception Coupling

Perception and action form a feedback loop through which organisms gather information to guide behavior. Yet many theories still treat perception as relatively passive, disconnected from the movements and bodily rhythms that shape sensory input and sustain life. We advance a framework that integrates active sensing, the voluntary control of sensing through movement, with interoceptive physiology in an active-inference framework. We propose that cardiac and respiratory cycles rhythmically tune the reliability of sensory evidence and readiness to move, creating recurring windows that favor sampling or action. Accordingly, cardiorespiratory rhythms shape action–perception coupling primarily by biasing when organisms sample information, for how long, and when they initiate action. Organisms can exploit permissive periods of the cardiorespiratory cycle and compensate during suppressive periods by delaying commitment, extending sampling, or adjusting decision criteria. Because respiration is partly under voluntary control, organisms can adjust their breathing to shift or extend these periods, thereby shaping this coupling. We further formalize how interoceptive and exteroceptive streams may interact under limited processing capacity to bias the weighting of sensory evidence and prior expectations, yielding testable predictions in both constrained laboratory designs and self-paced, naturalistic tasks. Treating bodily rhythms as internal control variables may unify accounts of moment-to-moment variability in perception and action, support more ecologically valid experimental designs, and motivate body-based interventions to enhance sensorimotor performance.