Giovanni Pezzulo
Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, National Research Council, Institute for Computational Linguistics “A. Zampolli”, Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione "Alessandro Faedo", National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, University of Tübingen
Papers
32
Total Citations
1,013
H-Index
14
About
Giovanni Pezzulo is a computational neuroscientist and cognitive scientist whose research bridges theoretical neuroscience, embodied cognition, and robotics. Based at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies in Rome, Pezzulo has built a distinguished career exploring how the brain generates intelligent behavior through prediction, simulation, and active engagement with the world. His most influential contributions center on active inference — the idea that the brain continuously minimizes surprise by predicting sensory inputs and acting to confirm those predictions. His highly cited reviews on active inference as a theory of sentient behavior have helped bring this framework to interdisciplinary audiences far beyond computational neuroscience, including robotics researchers. His 2016 case study applying active inference to robotic arm control demonstrated its real-world engineering potential. Pezzulo has also shaped thinking on grounded and embodied cognition, arguing compellingly that even abstract reasoning emerges from sensorimotor systems rather than amodal symbolic processing. His work on action simulation, sensorimotor communication, and goal-directed decision-making further maps the neural and computational architecture underlying purposeful behavior. With papers accumulating hundreds of citations across cognitive science, neuroscience, and AI, and growing interest in world models for developmental robotics, Pezzulo stands as a leading voice connecting biological intelligence to the next generation of autonomous systems.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
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- 3Active inference and robot control: a case study89 citations · 2016
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- 5Active inference as a theory of sentient behavior83 citations · 2024
- 6Action simulation in the human brain: Twelve questions74 citations · 2013
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- 10Computational explorations of perceptual symbol systems theory27 citations · 2009