The emulation theory of representation: Motor control, imagery, and perception

“These results are in accordance with theories that emphasize the importance of sensorimotor contingency between the subject and the sources of sensory stimulation [16, 24, 25].”

“, perception (Möller, 1999), mental imagery (Jeannerod, 1994; Moulton & Kosslyn, 2009; Thomas, 1999), mental representation (Grush, 2004), concepts (Barsalou, 1999) or language (Zwaan, 2004).”

“Another hypothesis on how motor areas might participate in mental rotation comes from the theories (Grush, 2004), neuroscientific evidence (Miall, 2003), and computational architectures (Wolpert & Kawato, 1998) on motor control based on forward models.”

“In this way, motor imagery could be defined as an internal dynamical state related to participants’ ability to use internal models to predict the sensory consequences of an action (Gabbard, Caçola, & Bobbio, 2011; Grush, 2004; Papaxanthis, Pozzo et al., 2002).”

“Such models have been introduced in motor-control theory and robotics to describe reaching movements, to plan movement trajectories, and to model imagery (for review and discussion, see Grush, 2004).”

“Grush (2004) synthesized these and similar findings to develop an emulation theory of mental representation, which stresses the influence of motor systems on, among other phenomena, visual imagery.”

“According to the emulation theory (Grush, 2004) and the results of recent studies, the inverse afferentation significantly influences the processes of forming mental images related to movements (Naito et al.”

“Indeed, even in our experiments, it is required that the agent ‘‘closes’’ its (sensorimotor) loop internally, in the internal model, instead than externally (in the world, via its actions and the feedback it receives); see Grush (2004) , Hesslow (2002), Jeannerod (2006), Pezzulo (2011), Pezzulo and Castelfranchi (2009…”

“MI is thought to activate similar cortical networks as activated in a real movement, including activation of the primary motor cortex, premotor cortex, supplementary motor area and parietal cortices [19], [20].”

“He also mentions Grush’s (2004) emulation theory of mental representation as a second nomic deserter. However, as Ramsey mulls over the implications of a non representational psychology, he observes that these model-based nonclassical theories are the exception rather than the rule (223). Another model that would serv…”

“…been argued that this involves a comparator process in which a model of the predicted eye movement is matched against input information of the actual eye movement (Blakemore, Wolpert, & Frith, 2002; Donaldson, 2000; Grush, 2004; Miall & Wolpert, 1996; Sperry, 1950; Von Holst & Mittelstaedt, 1950).”

“It has further been suggested that a key function of the AON is to predict other people’s actions (Grush, 2004; Kilner, Vargas, Duval, Blakemore, & Sirigu, 2004; Prinz, 1997, 2006; Wilson & Knoblich, 2005).”

“Neuronal processing during motor imagery is often understood as a “scaled-down” version of the very same processes occurring during overtly executed movements (Finke, 1979, 1980; Jeannerod, 1994, 2001; Grush, 2004).”

“In fact, a desired sensation can be induced through “as if” interaction which aligns with the client’s response anticipatorily (see emulation, Grush, 2004).”

“…are congruent with contributions that affirm that imagination is the creation of motor commands that inhibit efferent signals before muscles move (Grush, 2004) and that imagination and action have a neural substrate in common that links them directly and makes them functionally equivalent…”

“…useful in VPT as they provide information about what other people may see (for example, head orientation lets you know which direction a person is looking), and motor representation of the body is also thought of as the first step in performing an egocentric spatial transformation (Grush, 2004).”

“It has been reported that motor imagery is used to predict the proprioceptive consequences of movement and then contributes to movement planning (Grush 2004).”

“body states and stimulating the sensory consequences of the expected actions [18-21].”

“During planning, we very often picture the course of actions as an imaginary episode, from taking the plane to visiting the first museum, in a process that has been called imagination-based planning, model-based planning, mental simulations or emulation, each term carrying somehow different meanings [35, 36, 37, 38, 3…”

“Covert phonological processes (inner speech) might work as emulators of the to-be-recognized perceptual situation [7–9]; see also [10].”

“This distinction may be useful in explaining how offline forms of motor planning— resembling earlier theories of motor simulation (Grush 2004)—evolved progressively as elaborations on earlier sensorimotor control loops (Pezzulo 2012).”

“…Bubic, von Cramon, and Schubotz 2010; Llinás 2001); an understanding of mental representations as structural models (Cummins 1989; Gładziejewski 2015; Grush 2004; Ryder 2004; Shea 2014; Williams and Colling 2017); and an increased focus on regulation and predictive control as principles of brain…”

“Among other things, these processes would support the simulation (Jeannerod, 2001; Hesslow, 2002) and emulation (Grush, 2004) of bodily states, as tacitly assumed by recent models characterizing the prediction and understanding of external events (Schubotz, 2007).”

“These are a substitute for the sensory feedback that would normally arise in association with an overt action, probably by accessing memories of the experienced action (Annett 1995, 1996; Grush 2004; Guillot et al. 2009; Hanakawa 2016; Naito et al. 2002).”

“Future approaches will likely need to include the role of elemental action components such as anticipatory predictions from schemas in motor control theory (e.g., Schmidt, 1982; Grush, 2004; Barsalou, 2009; Kühn et al., 2011).”

“In contrast, motor control constitutes a form of cognition in the sense that every coordinated action requires the planning of well-orchestrated activity patterns and associated correction processes verifying the outcome ( Grush, 2004; Wolpert & Ghahramani, 2000).”

“The results are in line with those of many other previous studies [12], [21], [58], [59] and”

“…composed of elements whose dynamics of interactions are meant to model the dynamics of interactions between parts of the musculoskeletal system (see Grush 2004)then they are successful in performing their action-guiding function to the extent to which the way the emulator works structurally or…”

“CBP. In contrast to our exploratory work on choice blindness, the research on agency they present is carried by a strong theoretical framework developed within the field of computational motor control (e.g., Wolpert & Ghahramani, 2004, and taken to its limit as a general model of cognition by Grush, 2004 ).”

“These mental representations of a sequence of events as they unfold in time are akin to the idea of perceptual emulators (Grush, 2004; see also Wilson & Knoblich, 2005).”

“Importantly, models can be detached, i.e., allow for covert simulation, allowing representation of objects in their absence via internal loops (Grush, 2004; Pezzulo, 2011; Wolpert et al., 2003).”

“The final article will be available, upon publication, via its DOI: 10.1037/dev0000647 the system” (Bowlby,1969, p .43) Grush (2004) provides a broader review of forward models, describing their wide use in diverse theories of human cognition.”

“These are the defining features of simulation theory—specifically, that motor imagery is the psychological counterpart of the offline operation of the efferent motor areas [2].”

“Consequently, MI could be viewed as an internal dynamic state, during which individuals use internal models to consciously predict the sensory consequences of an action (Gabbard, Caçola, & Bobbio, 2011; Grush, 2004; Papaxanthis, Pozzo, Skoura, & Schieppati, 2002).”

“Running the forward model offline—that is, without producing motor output—can also be used to internally simulate limb movements; that is, to engage in motor imagery (Grush, 2004).”

“…aspects of intelligence: unsupervised learning (Kiefer and Hohwy 2018), reinforcement learning (Garrison, Erdeniz, and Done 2013), perception (Clark 2013), action and motor control (Grush 2004), planning (Bubic, von Cramon, and Schubotz 2010), and even memory (Schacter, Addis, and Buckner 2007).”

“So perhaps the primary form of representation for visual information should be representations of processes extended in time and space, whereas many researchers (an exception being Grush, 2004), assume that vision produces information about objects, properties and relationships.”

“…are compatible with the models developed in Lœvenbruck et al. (2018) and Grandchamp et al. (2019), as well as other models of motor imagery, such as Grush (2004), in which the role of the primary motor cortex during inner speech is to issue motor commands from which predictions of sensory…”

“The first—and more widespread—variant is ultimately based on the analysis of the behavior of a large class of neurocomputational models (cf. Churchland, 1995; O’Brien and Opie 2004; Grush, 2004; Shagrir, 2012; Williams, 2017; Wiese, 2016, 2017).”

“Further, the general perspective that action goals influence sensory perception has become widely accepted in recent decades, for example, in the interplay between vision and action (e.g., Prinz, 1997; Nöe, 2004; Grush, 2004).”

“…proposed to drive perceptual-cognitive-motor processes, including association (Barsalou, 1999, 2008; Hesslow, 2012; Pulvermüller, 2018), emulation (Grush, 2004), simulation (Barsalou, 1999, 2008; Jeannerod, 2001, 2006), perception-action coding (Hommel et al., 2001; Hommel, 2019), or predictive…”

“Hence, our minimalist simulations seem to demonstrate that it is possible to have an agent possessing ''full-blooded'' representations (in the strong sense of Clark and Grush) without having coupled inverse and forward models , as the emulator theory of representations suggests (Grush, 2004).”

“According to Grush [26], simulations can nest to produce increasingly abstract levels of description, in which the criteria for 'matching' are increasingly distant from perceptual matching, although they remain grounded on (actual or simulated) sensorimotor interaction.”

“The brain emulates various sensory experiences (feedback) that would be expected (predicted) if the imagined movements were actually performed by referring memories of previous enactments 2,5,36,49,64–66 .”

“This in turn might be the basis for cognitive processes such as planning and imagination, in so far as these can also concern distant objects, properties and events that are absent in a spatial sense (Clark and Grush 1999; Grush 2004).”

“The notion of emulation refers not only to a sensorimotor preparation, but also to the ability of the brain to run an off-line model in order to produce mental imagery (60), a conscious access to simulations of emulators, being engaged in hypnosis (2).”

“compensating for delay or noise in sensory signals), and that they may have later become available to enable more complex forms of goal-directed or intentional control, which, by inverting the process, use these predictions to select the actions that will cause the predicted sensory effects [30,36,73].”

“This corresponds to the notion that sensorimotor simulations enable for extrapolating future actions (Grush, 2004; Thornton & Knoblich, 2006).”

“In the quest of a basic simulation mechanism, forward and inverse models have been proposed (e.g. Grush, 2004; Miall & Wolpert, 1996; Wolpert, Ghahramani, & Flanagan, 2001).”

“MI would be used to predict the proprioceptive consequences of an action and then contribute to movement planning (Grush, 2004; Papaxanthis, Pozzo, Skoura, & Schieppati, 2002).”

“…neurology and psychology that what we experience is actually heavily influenced by our executive expectations, past experiences, and biases instead of a direct experience of external stimuli (Driver and Vuilleumier, 2001; Smythies, 2003; Grush, 2004; Revonsuo, 2006; Maldonato and Dell’Orco, 2012).”

“An improved feedback model is discussed in [26], where an inner observer is added to the control loop.”

“This proposal has been developed in L. Barsalou’s Theory of Perceptual Symbols (Barsalou, 1999) and in other views arguing for modal simulations underlying language understanding (e.g. Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998; Glenberg & Robertson, 1999; Grush, 2004; Gallese, 2008; Zwaan, 2016).”

“We therefore conclude that implicit sequence learning is based on similar mechanisms in AIP and AEP (Grush, 2004; Jeannerod, 2001).”