I am a Researcher in Cognitive Sciences at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the Italian National Research Council of Rome (ISTC-CNR). My scientific interests are placed within the fields of Cognitive and Developmental Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Computational Psychiatry. I recently got interested in Predictive Coding and Active Inference models of the brain within the context of emotional processing and psychopathological conditions. I have significantly contributed to the field of interoceptive research, including my collaborative work on developing a novel interoceptive illusion (Iodice et al., 2019), which highlighted the malleability of interoceptive experience and its impact on subjective feelings. I have also contributed to a collaborative effort to define and classify interoceptive technologies (Scheller et al., 2024). Furthermore, I have advanced novel active inference models of psychopathological conditions such as anorexia nervosa (Barca and Pezzulo, 2022), non-suicidal self-injury (Barca et al., 2023), and panic disorder (Maisto et al., 2021), and interoceptive dysfunction (Tschantz et al., 2022). The work on anorexia is currently supported by a grant (PRIN 2022. BoSE), and we are employing cognitive tasks, virtual reality environments, and computational models to investigate the underlying mechanisms of body image distortion in this disorder.