Predictive processing framework has found wide applications in cognitive science and philosophy. It is an attractive candidate for a unified account of the mind in which perception, action, and cognition fit together in a single model. However, PP cannot claim this role if it fails to accommodate an essential part of cognition—conceptual thought. Recently, Williams argued that PP struggles to address at least two of thought’s core properties—generality and rich compositionality. In this paper, I show that neither necessarily presents a (...) problem for PP. In particular, I argue that because we do not have access to cognitive processes but only to their conscious manifestations, compositionality may be a manifest property of thought, rather than a feature of the thinking process, and result from the interplay of thinking and language. Pace Williams, both of these capacities, constituting parts of a complex and multifarious cognitive system, may be fully based on the architectural principles of PP. Under the assumption that language presents a subsystem separate from conceptual thought, I sketch out one possible way for PP to accommodate both generality and rich compositionality. (shrink)

In recent years, language has been shown to play a number of important cognitive roles over and above the communication of thoughts. One hypothesis gaining support is that language facilitates thought about abstract categories, such as democracy or prediction. To test this proposal, a novel set of semantic memory task trials, designed for assessing abstract thought non-linguistically, were normed for levels of abstractness. The trials were rated as more or less abstract to the degree that answering them required the participant (...) to abstract away from both perceptual features and common setting associations corresponding to the target image. The normed materials were then used with a population of people with aphasia to assess the relationship of abstract thought to language. While the language-impaired group with aphasia showed lower overall accuracy and longer response times than controls in general, of special note is that their response times were significantly longer as a function of a trial’s degree of abstractness. Further, the aphasia group’s response times in reporting their degree of confidence (a separate, metacognitive measure) were negatively correlated with their language production abilities, with lower language scores predicting longer metacognitive response times. These results provide some support for the hypothesis that language is an important aid to abstract thought and to metacognition about abstract thought. (shrink)

Predictive processing (PP) has been repeatedly presented as a unificatory account of perception, action, and cognition. In this paper, we argue that this is premature: As a unifying theory, PP fails to deliver general, simple, homogeneous, and systematic explanations. By examining its current trajectory of development, we conclude that PP remains only loosely connected both to its computational framework and to its hypothetical biological underpinnings, which makes its fundamentals unclear. Instead of offering explanations that refer to the same set of (...) principles, we observe systematic equivocations in PP‐based models, or outright contradictions with its avowed principles. To make matters worse, PP‐based models are seldom empirically validated, and they are frequently offered as mere just‐so stories. The large number of PP‐based models is thus not evidence of theoretical progress in unifying perception, action, and cognition. On the contrary, we maintain that the gap between theory and its biological and computational bases contributes to the arrested development of PP as a unificatory theory. Thus, we urge the defenders of PP to focus on its critical problems instead of offering mere re‐descriptions of known phenomena, and to validate their models against possible alternative explanations that stem from different theoretical assumptions. Otherwise, PP will ultimately fail as a unified theory of cognition. (shrink)

All epistemic agents physically consist of parts that must somehow comprise an integrated cognitive self. Biological individuals consist of subunits (organs, cells, molecular networks) that are themselves complex and competent in their own context. How do coherent biological Individuals result from the activity of smaller sub-agents? To understand the evolution and function of metazoan bodies and minds, it is essential to conceptually explore the origin of multicellularity and the scaling of the basal cognition of individual cells into a coherent larger (...) organism. In this paper I synthesize ideas in cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and developmental physiology toward a hypothesis about the origin of Individuality: “Scale-Free Cognition”. I propose a fundamental definition of an Individual based on the ability to pursue goals at an appropriate level of scale and organization, and suggest a formalism for defining and comparing the cognitive capacities of highly diverse types of agents. Any Self is demarcated by a computational surface – the spatio-temporal boundary of events that it can measure, model, and try to affect. This surface sets a functional boundary - a cognitive “light cone” which defines the scale and limits of its cognition. I hypothesize that higher-level goal-directed activity and agency, resulting in larger cognitive boundaries, evolve from the primal homeostatic drive of living things to reduce stress – the difference between current conditions and life-optimal conditions. The mechanisms of developmental bioelectricity - the ability of all cells to form electrical networks that process information - suggests a plausible set of gradual evolutionary steps that naturally lead from physiological homeostasis in single cells to memory, prediction, and ultimately complex cognitive agents, via scale-up of the drive of infotaxis. Recent data on the molecular mechanisms of pre-neural bioelectricity suggest a model of how increasingly sophisticated cognitive functions emerge smoothly from cell-cell communication used to guide embryogenesis and regeneration. This set of hypotheses provides a novel perspective on numerous phenomena, such as cancer, and makes several unique, testable predictions for interdisciplinary research that have implications not only for evolutionary developmental biology but also for biomedicine and perhaps artificial intelligence and exobiology. (shrink)

words compose a significant part of speech. Despite this, learning them is complicated. Abstract concepts collect more heterogeneous exemplars and are more detached from sensory modalities than concrete concepts. Recent views propose that, because of their complexity, other people are pivotal for abstract concepts’ acquisition and use, e.g., to explain their meaning. We tested this hypothesis using a combined behavioral and thermal imaging paradigm. Twenty-one Italian children determined whether acoustic stimuli were or not correct Italian words. Concrete terms yielded faster (...) responses than abstract ones: for the first time, this effect appears with response times in very young children. More crucially, the higher increase in temperature of the nasal tip suggests that, with abstract concepts, children might be more socially and cognitively engaged. (shrink)

Reappraisal is a frequently used and often successful emotion regulation strategy. However, its underlying cognitive mechanisms are not well understood. In this paper, we seek to clarify these mechanisms by expanding upon our recently proposed reAppraisal framework. According to this framework, reappraisal consists of appraisal shifts that arise from changes to the mental construal of a situation (reconstrual) or from changes to the goals that are used to evaluate the construal (repurposing). Here we propose that reappraisal can target both object-level (...) construals and goals representing states in the environment as well as meta-level construals and goals about different states in the mind. We also propose that reappraisal can operate by facilitating decommitment from a dominant construal or goal as well as by facilitating commitment to alternative construals or goals. We demonstrate that the 2 × 2 × 2 matrix formed by crossing the three distinctions between reconstrual and repurposing, between object-level and meta-level representations, and between decommitment and commitment operations forms a useful map of different reappraisal tactics. We draw examples of each of the 8 reappraisal tactics from basic and clinical research. We conclude by considering future research inspired by the expanded reAppraisal framework. (shrink)

The predictive processing framework posits that people continuously use predictive principles when interacting with, learning from, and interpreting their surroundings. Here, we suggest that the same framework may help explain how people process self-relevant knowledge and maintain a stable and positive self-concept. Specifically, we recast two prominent self-relevant motivations, self-verification and self-enhancement, in predictive processing (PP) terms. We suggest that these self-relevant motivations interact with the self-concept (i.e., priors) to create strong predictions. These predictions, in turn, influence how people interpret (...) information about themselves. In particular, we argue that these strong self-relevant predictions dictate how prediction error, the deviation from the original prediction, is processed. In contrast to many implementations of the PP framework, we suggest that predictions and priors emanating from stable constructs (such as the self-concept) cultivate belief-maintaining, rather than belief-updating, dynamics. Based on recent findings, we also postulate that evidence supporting a predicted model of the self (or interpreted as such) triggers subjective reward responses, potentially reinforcing existing beliefs. Characterizing the role of rewards in self-belief maintenance and reframing self-relevant motivations and rewards in predictive processing terms offers novel insights into how the self is maintained in neurotypical adults, as well as in pathological populations, potentially pointing to therapeutic implications. (shrink)

We compare bifocal stance theory's (BST) approach to social learning to construal level theory's (CLT) – a social-cognitive theory positing that psychological closeness to a model influences action-representation and thus modulates how concretely or abstractly observers emulate models. Whereas BST argues that social motives produce higher fidelity emulation, CLT argues that psychological closeness impacts cognitive construal and produces more concrete emulation across diverse motivations for emulation.

According to Lee and Schwarz, the sensorimotor experience of cleansing involves separating one physical entity from another and grounds mental separation of one psychological entity from another. We propose that cleansing effects may result from symbolic cognition. Instead of viewing abstract meanings as emerging from concrete physical acts of cleansing, this physical act may be appended with pre-existing, symbolic meaning.