An Active Inference view of cognitive control

“A reconciling perspective is that prefrontal cortex supports “cognitive control”: the control of thought processes and the top–down guidance of overt behavior toward distal goals (Fuster, 1997; Miller and Cohen, 2001; Botvinick, 2008).”

“0006421 Friston, K., Samothrakis, S., andMontague, R. (2012).”

“In some cases, the overt loop is recruited for planning and thinking, too, such as for instance when Tetris players rotate blocks to better decide where to place them (Kirsh and Maglio, 1994).”

“Partial support for this view comes from the close relationships between the neural systems for motor preparation and mental imagery (Cisek and Kalaska, 2010).”

“…we assume that cognitive con-trol and mental operations are internalized forms of overt actions and recruit the same brain structures, rather than involving separated neural representations and dedicated, modular processing (Diamond, 2000; Barkley, 2001; Cotterill, 2001; Ito, 2008; Pezzulo, 2011).”

“…such as planning, emulation, imagery, mental state inference, goal-directed decision-making, prospection, and the acquisition of declarative knowledge (Hesslow, 2002; Grush, 2004; Jeannerod, 2006; Pezzulo and Castelfranchi, 2007, 2009; Moulton and Kosslyn, 2009; Pezzulo, 2011; Clark, in press).”

“…we assume that cognitive con-trol and mental operations are internalized forms of overt actions and recruit the same brain structures, rather than involving separated neural representations and dedicated, modular processing (Diamond, 2000; Barkley, 2001; Cotterill, 2001; Ito, 2008; Pezzulo, 2011).”

“…we assume that cognitive con-trol and mental operations are internalized forms of overt actions and recruit the same brain structures, rather than involving separated neural representations and dedicated, modular processing (Diamond, 2000; Barkley, 2001; Cotterill, 2001; Ito, 2008; Pezzulo, 2011).”

“…such as planning, emulation, imagery, mental state inference, goal-directed decision-making, prospection, and the acquisition of declarative knowledge (Hesslow, 2002; Grush, 2004; Jeannerod, 2006; Pezzulo and Castelfranchi, 2007, 2009; Moulton and Kosslyn, 2009; Pezzulo, 2011; Clark, in press).”

“A reconciling perspective is that prefrontal cortex supports “cognitive control”: the control of thought processes and the top–down guidance of overt behavior toward distal goals (Fuster, 1997; Miller and Cohen, 2001; Botvinick, 2008).”

“The Active Inference framework (Friston et al., 2009; Friston, 2010) argues that the brain’s generative models continuously produce predictions and goals that guide its action (active inference) and perception (predictive coding) through free energy minimization.”

“…such as planning, emulation, imagery, mental state inference, goal-directed decision-making, prospection, and the acquisition of declarative knowledge (Hesslow, 2002; Grush, 2004; Jeannerod, 2006; Pezzulo and Castelfranchi, 2007, 2009; Moulton and Kosslyn, 2009; Pezzulo, 2011; Clark, in press).”

“[Note that specifying contextual rules or plans to distal goals requires setting strong priors over sets of states and transitions rather than just one set point (Friston et al., 2012)].”

“…such as planning, emulation, imagery, mental state inference, goal-directed decision-making, prospection, and the acquisition of declarative knowledge (Hesslow, 2002; Grush, 2004; Jeannerod, 2006; Pezzulo and Castelfranchi, 2007, 2009; Moulton and Kosslyn, 2009; Pezzulo, 2011; Clark, in press).”

“…we assume that cognitive con-trol and mental operations are internalized forms of overt actions and recruit the same brain structures, rather than involving separated neural representations and dedicated, modular processing (Diamond, 2000; Barkley, 2001; Cotterill, 2001; Ito, 2008; Pezzulo, 2011).”

“…such as planning, emulation, imagery, mental state inference, goal-directed decision-making, prospection, and the acquisition of declarative knowledge (Hesslow, 2002; Grush, 2004; Jeannerod, 2006; Pezzulo and Castelfranchi, 2007, 2009; Moulton and Kosslyn, 2009; Pezzulo, 2011; Clark, in press).”

“…such as planning, emulation, imagery, mental state inference, goal-directed decision-making, prospection, and the acquisition of declarative knowledge (Hesslow, 2002; Grush, 2004; Jeannerod, 2006; Pezzulo and Castelfranchi, 2007, 2009; Moulton and Kosslyn, 2009; Pezzulo, 2011; Clark, in press).”

“Disruption of this process might result in the execution of imagined actions, as it was reported by Schwoebel et al. (2002) in the case of a patient with bilateral parietal lesions who was unable to refrain from executing imagined (hand) movements.”

“…such as planning, emulation, imagery, mental state inference, goal-directed decision-making, prospection, and the acquisition of declarative knowledge (Hesslow, 2002; Grush, 2004; Jeannerod, 2006; Pezzulo and Castelfranchi, 2007, 2009; Moulton and Kosslyn, 2009; Pezzulo, 2011; Clark, in press).”

“Mechanistically, this requires self-control [213] and inhibition [214] processes that guide the anticipatory control loops [208].”

“This is accommodated by predictions about transitions over increasingly protracted time scales (Friston, 2008; Pezzulo, 2012).”

“Only then can this goal-relevant bodily information effectively drive iterative rounds of simulating different actions, and predicting/comparing their likely outcomes, and ultimately lead to a consensus regarding the best course of action (for detailed reviews of these processes, see Dayan and Daw, 2008; Dehaene and S…”

“In this perspective, the off-line re-enactment of action, perception, and emotional processes, which is based on internally generated (not stimulus-dependent) brain dynamics [198], realizes higher cognitive functions such as planning and long-term decisions and also entrains the online sensorimotor processes that ulti…”

“At the same time, these covert operations can be put into practice (to support situated action) by re-engaging brain dynamics operating at the appropriate timescale for action–perception loops [37,56,59].”

“The active minimisation of free energy is known as active inference , which means the brain can selectively sample from data that concur with its current expectations (Friston et al. 2011; Pezzulo, 2012).”

“Understanding how different and heterogeneous elements combine in predictive coding architectures, and their relative importances, can shed light on the architecture of conceptual knowledge (Barsalou, 2008; Pezzulo, 2012; Pezzulo and Castelfranchi, 2009; Pezzulo et al., 2011, 2013).”

“of movements and sequences of sequences [49–51].”

“This latter process is termed active inference (59, 60) and applies to both perceptual and motor hierarchies.”

“Note that variational Laplace has been proposed as an implementation of various cognitive processes in biological systems [25,52,58] accounting for several features of the brain’s functional anatomy and neural message passing [53,70,99,102,103].”

“This fact should not be surprising, as the same framework has been used to model autonomous systems at various levels of complexity, from cells that self-organize and show the emergence of life from a primordial soup [101] or of morphogenetic processes [102], to more sophisticated agent models that engage in cognitive…”

“Hence, this result lends additional credibility to active inference as a generalised framework for understanding human behaviour, not only in the behavioural experiments inspired by multi-armed bandits [33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38], but in a range of related investigations of human and animal decision making in complex dyn…”

“, past injuries that were sustained when foraging outside of one’s territory), such models institute goals as priors that structure and contextualize (but do not necessarily specify) the sub-routines that manifest in ongoing behavior (Pezzulo, 2012; Pezzulo et al., 2015)(8).”

“…are a characteristic feature of most model-based probabilistic architectures for goal-directed behavior, such as planning-as-inference (Pezzulo, 2012; Solway and Botvinick, 2012; Pezzulo et al., 2013) and active inference (Friston, 2010; Clark, 2013), where they have a key role in…”

“…within the PP framework: The selection of particular action policies involves assigning low precision to sensory information about the current status of the body, which allows the proprioceptive predictions consistent with the desired bodily trajectory to prevail (Clark, 2020; Pezzulo, 2012).”

“Executive functions in turn involve part of an output hierarchy that is engaged in high-level (conceptual and premotor) planning, with a predominant connection to motor output (controlling muscle action) (Pezzulo, 2012).”

“This also fits with the idea that the planning and regulating of bodily actions are central to executive function (Dick and Overton, 2010; Gottwald et al., 2016; Hendry et al., 2016; Pezzulo, 2012; Zelazo et al., 2013).”

“…implicated in Lobule VI are important for Pavlovian conditioning and emotional learning (Adams et al., 2013; Barrett et al., 1708; Brown et al., 2013; Pezzulo, 2012; Pu et al., 2020), including perceptual inferences such as startle responses and spontaneous behavior (Friston & Herreros, 2016).”

“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).”

“To do so, we draw on the predictive processing theory of mind [5] (also related are active inference and predictive coding [25]) which describes all of cognition as continuous prediction and error minimisation.”

“Cognitive systems are efficient by using previous knowledge from past experiences in order to anticipate and adapt to future events (Clark, 2013; Pezzulo, 2012; Pezzulo, Hoffmann, & Falcone, 2007).”

“Despite sharing numerous similarities, a clear account of these similarities is surprisingly lacking in the literature (though see [20] for an exception).”

“Such practice would amount to a process of ‘running imaginary actions that produce a sequence of fi ctive actions and of predictions relative to future (rather than present) situations’ (Pezzulo, 2012, p. 1).”

“And based on this, plan the exploration sequence (Pezzulo, 2012).”