Active inference, communication and hermeneutics

“…1866/1962) and has been formalised to cover deep or hierarchical Bayesian inference e about the causes of our sensations e and how these inferences induce beliefs, movement and behaviour (Clark, 2013; Dayan, Hinton, & Neal, 1995; Friston, Kilner, & Harrison, 2006; Hohwy, 2013; Lee & Mumford, 2003).”

“This form of hierarchical inference explains a large number of anatomical and physiological facts as reviewed elsewhere (Adams, Shipp, & Friston, 2013; Bastos et al., 2012; Friston, 2008).”

“…1866/1962) and has been formalised to cover deep or hierarchical Bayesian inference e about the causes of our sensations e and how these inferences induce beliefs, movement and behaviour (Clark, 2013; Dayan, Hinton, & Neal, 1995; Friston, Kilner, & Harrison, 2006; Hohwy, 2013; Lee & Mumford, 2003).”

“This model has been used previously to illustrate several phenomena in perception; such as perceptual learning, repetition suppression, and the recognition of stimulus streams with deep hierarchical structure (Friston & Kiebel, 2009; Kiebel, Daunizeau, & Friston, 2008).”

“…1866/1962) and has been formalised to cover deep or hierarchical Bayesian inference e about the causes of our sensations e and how these inferences induce beliefs, movement and behaviour (Clark, 2013; Dayan, Hinton, & Neal, 1995; Friston, Kilner, & Harrison, 2006; Hohwy, 2013; Lee & Mumford, 2003).”

“Crucially, the delicate balance of precision at different hierarchical levels has a profound effect on veridical inference e and may also offer a formal understanding of false inference in psychopathology (Adams, Stephan, Brown, Frith & Friston, 2013; Fletcher & Frith, 2009).”

“The dynamic and contextsensitive control of precision has been associated with attentional gain control in sensory processing (Feldman & Friston, 2010; Jiang, Summerfield, & Egner, 2013) and has been discussed in terms of affordance in active inference and action selection (Cisek, 2007; Frank,…”

“Having said this, there is growing interest in applying the principles of predictive coding to language: e.g., (Arnal & Giraud, 2012; Hickok, 2013; Pickering & Clark, 2014; Wang, Mathalon, et al., 2014) e and understanding the algebra of dynamical systems in terms of communication; e.g.,…”

“…precision has been associated with attentional gain control in sensory processing (Feldman & Friston, 2010; Jiang, Summerfield, & Egner, 2013) and has been discussed in terms of affordance in active inference and action selection (Cisek, 2007; Frank, Scheres,& Sherman, 2007; Friston et al., 2012).”

“In brief, it explains the hierarchical nature of cortical connections; the prevalence of backward connections and many of the functional and structural asymmetries in the extrinsic connections that link hierarchical levels (Zeki & Shipp, 1988).”

“Modern formulations of the Bayesian brain e such as predictive coding e are now among the most popular explanations for neuronalmessage passing (Clark, 2013; Friston, 2008; Rao& Ballard, 1999; Srinivasan et al., 1982).”

“Modern formulations of the Bayesian brain e such as predictive coding e are now among the most popular explanations for neuronalmessage passing (Clark, 2013; Friston, 2008; Rao& Ballard, 1999; Srinivasan et al., 1982).”

“In these schemes, neuronal representations e in higher levels of cortical hierarchies e generate predictions of representations in lower levels (Friston, 2008; Mumford, 1992; Rao & Ballard, 1999).”

“We will use the same approach in this paper to model turn taking (Wilson & Wilson, 2005) in the switching between speaking (singing) and listening.”

“This process has many of the hallmarks of interactive alignment in the context of joint action and dialogue (Garrod & Pickering, 2009).”

“In these schemes, neuronal representations e in higher levels of cortical hierarchies e generate predictions of representations in lower levels (Friston, 2008; Mumford, 1992; Rao & Ballard, 1999).”

“Here, we pursue the same theme but when two birds learn from each other; specifically focussing on sensorimotor learning during which individuals learn to vocalise: see Bolhuis & Gahr (2006) for discussion of birdsong learning.”

“As noted in (Friston and Frith, 2015), this simulation of omission-related responses as measured with ERPs (Bendixen, SanMiguel, & Schr€oger, 2012) is particularly interesting, given that non-invasive electromagnetic signals arise largely from superficial pyramidal cells.”

“Ameasure of the attractor's volume is provided by its measure theoretic entropy (Sinai, 1959).”

“…filter of sensations e or an elaborate stimulus-response link e towards a view of the brain as an organ that generates hypotheses or fantasies (fantastic: from Greek phantastikos, the ability to create mental images, from phantazesthai), which are tested against sensory evidence (Gregory, 1968).”

“These sequences can be simple, such as the quasi-periodic attractors of central pattern generators or can exhibit complicated sequences of the sort associated with itinerant dynamics (Breakspear & Stam, 2005; Rabinovich, Huerta, & Laurent, 2008).”

“Having said this, there is growing interest in applying the principles of predictive coding to language: e.g., (Arnal & Giraud, 2012; Hickok, 2013; Pickering & Clark, 2014; Wang, Mathalon, et al., 2014) e and understanding the algebra of dynamical systems in terms of communication; e.g.,…”

“Our underlying premise is that we are trying to model the causes of our sensations e and adjust those models to maximise Bayesian model evidence or, equivalently, minimise surprise (Brown & Brün, 2012; Kilner, Friston, & Frith, 2007).”

“The Lorenz form for these dynamics is a somewhat arbitrary choice but provides a ubiquitous model of chaotic dynamics in the physical (Poland, 1993) and biological (de Boer & Perelson, 1991) sciences.”

“There is an extensive modelling effort using attractor models to understand the generation of birdsong at the biomechanical level (Mindlin & Laje, 2005).”

“The Lorenz form for these dynamics is a somewhat arbitrary choice but provides a ubiquitous model of chaotic dynamics in the physical (Poland, 1993) and biological (de Boer & Perelson, 1991) sciences.”

“Using free energy minimisation, Yildiz, von Kriegstein, and Kiebel (2013) have shown that a hierarchy of nonlinear dynamical systems can learn speech samples rapidly and recognize them robustly, even in adverse conditions.”

“…is growing interest in applying the principles of predictive coding to language: e.g., (Arnal & Giraud, 2012; Hickok, 2013; Pickering & Clark, 2014; Wang, Mathalon, et al., 2014) e and understanding the algebra of dynamical systems in terms of communication; e.g., (Scott-Phillips & Blythe, 2013).”

“This perspective on action and perception has broad explanatory power in several areas of cognitive neuroscience e and enjoys support from several lines of neuroanatomical and neurophysiological evidence (Egner & Summerfield, 2013; Rao & Ballard, 1999; Srinivasan, Laughlin, & Dubs, 1982).”

“I can invent a coherent story or narrative, but I can never independently verify my interpretations (Frith & Wentzer, 2013).”

“In a companion paper (Friston & Frith, 2015), we demonstrate how communication facilitates long-term changes in generative models that are trying to predict each other.”

“For example, when we move, we suppress all tactile input to a moving effector – regardless of whether or not it is a predicted outcome of action [29,38–40] – perhaps due to spinal gating mechanisms ([41]; see also ‘active inference’ theories [42–44]).”

“Joint action may thus be best understood within a predictive coding framework 216,217 , where the emphasis is on establishing a shared narrative and mutual predictability.”

“Conversely, when action upon the environment effectively teaches the environment about the agent—and the environment holds imprecise beliefs about the agent—the environment will yield to the agent’s beliefs more readily (cf. results summarized in figure 3 [71]).”

“It illustrates a simple form of (active) inference that has been used in a variety of applications and simulations; ranging from handwriting and action observation [97], through to birdsong and generalised synchrony in communication [56].”

“periments (makes actions) that produce expected results (Friston and Frith, 2015).”

“From an FEP-AI perspective, this coupling relationship is one of mutual modeling and collaborative inference (Friston and Frith, 2015; Friston, 2017; Kirchhoff et al., 2018; Palacios et al., 2019).”

“Further, there is a large and growing literature extending this basic framework to explain an array of other psychological phenomena: attention (Feldman and Friston 2010), social cognition (Friston and Frith 2015), neural pathologies such as schizophrenia (Fletcher and Frith 2008) and autism (Van de Cruys et al.”

“These controlled processes during speech perception have been suggested to support turn-taking in conversational settings (Friston & Frith, 2015; Levinson, 2016), where a listener has to plan what she/ he is going to utter once the talker has concluded her/his message.”

“The integration of these predictive coding principals with emotion perception is only an emerging topic, but predictive coding has already been elegantly applied to the problem of “communication” more generally (Friston & Frith, 2015a, 2015b; Schilbach et al., 2013; von der Lune et al., 2016).”

“…coding has been implemented in a number of qualitatively different ways, primarily in relation to visual processing e.g., (Rao & Ballard, 1999; Spratling, 2008; 2017a), but also for other modalities, e.g., (Kilner et al. , 2007; Kiebel et al. , 2009; Friston & Frith, 2015; Rubin et al. , 2016).”

“There is some evidence that ToM and, by association, anthropomorphism, reflect a more general predictive strategy people use to process unpredictability in the environment, independent of any one agent’s human-like properties, called predictive encoding (Friston and Frith, 2015).”

“…as exploration (Friston et al., 2015; Mirza et al., 2016), handwriting (Friston, Mattout, & Kilner, 2011), eye-blink conditioning (Friston & Herreros, 2016), habit formation (FitzGerald, Dolan, & Friston, 2014), communication (Friston & Frith, 2015), and insight (Friston, Lin, et al., 2017).”

“Such learning was addressed by Frith and Friston (2015), which is the focus of this section.”

“Subsequent work looked at coupling two synthetic birds to harness identical synchronisation as a metaphor for communication [69,70].”

“For instance, how does the precision about policies in one person affect the same parameter in an interactive partner (Friston & Frith, 2015; Isomura et al., 2019)?”

“Fluent speech, however, also requires the brain to make accurate predictions about the state of the effector system and the sensory consequences of planned motor actions (Friston and Frith, 2015; Hickok, 2012), as neural transmission and processing delays of sensory feedback pose a significant problem for sensorimotor…”

“From a predictive coding perspective, sensory attenuation is considered a particular case of optimizing sensory data precision thought to be encoded by the gain of neuronal populations encoding prediction errors (Friston and Frith, 2015).”

“As auditory speech signals enter the sensory auditory system and are complemented by visual signals and cues, the human brain generates and constantly updates predictions about the timing and content of upcoming speech (Friston and Frith, 2015; Pickering and Garrod, 2007, 2013).”

“Generative models come to be aligned through two related processes, both based on precision modulation and hence both compromised in ASC, namely communication or turn-taking (see Friston and Frith 2015) and joint attention.”

“Other applications of active inference are text recognition (Friston K. J. et al., 2015), speech recognition (Kiebel et al., 2009a), perceptual categorization (Kiebel et al., 2009b), robotic arm control (Pio-Lopez et al., 2016).”

“Many studies have suggested these mechanisms are impaired in schizophrenia (Gray et al., 1991; Friston and Frith, 2015; Sterzer et al., 2016; Corlett, 2017; Griffin and Fletcher, 2017).”

“…mentalizing in autism spectrum disorders (van de Cruys et al. 2014; Palmer et al. 2015; Lawson et al. 2014), visual word recognition (Price and Devlin 2011), communication (Friston and Frith 2015), binocular rivalry (Hohwy et al. 2008), and the rubber hand illusion (Palmer et al. 2013, 2015).”

“In brief, by equipping predictive coding with reflexes, active inference simulates action trajectories, action observation and indeed communication (e.g., the bird song examples in Friston and Frith (2015)).”

“On this ground, active inference means minimizing predictive error using action by actively (re–)sampling and changing sensory input to confirm the prediction and prior belief (changing the world through action to confirm one’s own beliefs) (Friston and Frith, 2015).”

“17 An anonymous reviewer helpfully points out the excellent work within the Bayesian brain hypothesis on social cognition (e.g. Friston and Frith, 2015a, 2015b).”

“Previous studies have modeled communication between agents in analogy with the mirror neuron system (Kilner, Friston, & Frith, 2007; Friston, Mattout, & Kilner, 2011; Friston & Frith, 2015a, 2015b).”

“Physiologically, this corresponds to increasing the synaptic gain of various neuronal populations encoding prediction errors (Vossel et al., 2014; Auksztulewicz and Friston, 2015).”

“More generally, solenoidal coupling may be essential for self-organisation and active inference; especially, when considered in the light of oscillations and communication [34] or, indeed, evolutionary dynamics: at an evolutionary level, solenoidal flows and fluxes play a central role in accounting for self-organisati…”

“Third, the avian brain also seems to include neural circuits for predictive coding (Friston and Frith, 2015) during own song production and probably also during other songs perception, including predictions originating in the HVC and S.”

“, by endowing AIF agents with a genetic prior for functional specialization within a superordinate system; see [33]) or by constructing a scenario in which a superordinate agent (or shared generative model) is predestined by virtue of the fact that agents’ environment is constituted only by the sensory generated by ea…”

“…control) as well as other domains including interoception, awareness and consciousness (Clark 2015; Clark 2016; Donnarumma et al. 2017; Hohwy 2013; Friston et al. 2013; Friston and Frith 2015a; Friston and Frith 2015b; Friston et al. 2016a; Pezzulo and Rigoli 2011, Seth 2013; Stoianov et al. 2016).”

“Furthermore, talking cures could be beneficial for the sense of agency experienced by depressive individuals, provided that verbal communication can be understood as an important instance of active inference (Friston and Frith 2015a, b).”

“It is therefore action that, ultimately, updates the internal model, through an exchange with the external world (Friston and Frith 2015a, b).”

“The potential convergence of a “student’s” generative model upon the generative model of a confident “teacher” (of the same type) is exactly what the bird song simulations above aimed to demonstrate (Frith and Wentzer, 2013; Friston and Frith, 2015b).”

“More practically, it might speak to the design principles for ecosystems of intelligent agents (Friston and Frith, 2015; Friston et al., 2022b; Frith and Wentzer, 2013).”

“We suggest, after Friston and Frith, that the ‘Markov blanket’ might be one means that a predictive system hierarchy can distinguish itself from other (Friston and Frith 2015).”

“Conceptual alignment could reduce the possibility of prediction error, thus benefiting the interactive communication (Friston & Frith, 2015).”

“Such predictions probably facilitate speech comprehension as well as coordination of turn-taking transitions during verbal conversation (Friston and Frith, 2015; Zion Golumbic et al., 2012).”

“Social connections can be defined in terms of the exchange of free energy between different agents through synchronized action-perception cycles and have produced a novel way of thinking about reciprocity and hermeneutics (Friston and Frith, 2015; Vasil et al., 2020).”

“Cortisol synchrony between parents and children has been consistently observed, particularly under conditions of stress, novelty, or emotional challenge [56–58].”

“…& Turk-Browne, 2016; Parr & Friston, 2017b), attention (Ainley, Apps, Fotopoulou, & Tsakiris, 2016; Feldman & Friston, 2010; Kanai, Komura, Shipp, & Friston, 2015; Parr & Friston, 2019), motivation (Tate, 2019), emotions (Joffily & Coricelli, 2013; Barrett, 2017; Ridderinkhof, 2017; Wilkinson,…”

“It is also compatible with an emerging perspective that internal predictive systems are actively engaged in the sensory and higher-level processing in communication, facilitating the online construction and updating of prospective evaluation during an ongoing conversation (12, 13, 58, 59).”

“Finally, important work on communication has already been done in the active inference framework (Friston & Frith, 2015a, 2015b; Vasil et al., 2020).”

“4The model can be extended hierarchically to also include higher-level variables, such as distal goals and beliefs [3], [8], [22], [59].”