Bodily rhythms as a scaffold for active sensing

Perception guides action, while action determines which information is sampled and becomes available. Active sensing captures the information-directed component of this loop, through which organisms adjust sampling to task demands. Crucially, sampling unfolds alongside cardiac and respiratory cycles, which create time-varying conditions for perception and action. We propose that these rhythms should be incorporated into accounts of action–perception and active sensing because they may organize when and how sensing and action occur. To formalize this, we introduce a three-level framework that distinguishes bodily influences on externally imposed sensory events from those that organize and adapt the acquisition of information itself. This framework treats bodily rhythms as a temporal scaffold with consequences for what organisms sense, learn, and expect to perceive.