Category: Active Inference
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Cardiac activity: its role in perception and action
Patterns of cardiac activity continuously vary with environmentaldemands, accelerating or decelerating depending on circumstances. Simultaneously, cardiac cycle affects a host of higher-order processes, where systolic baroreceptor activation largely impairs processing. However, a unified functional perspective on the role of cardiac signal in perception and action has been lacking. — Patterns of cardiac activity continuously vary…
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The Art of Abduction
Abductive reasoning typically begins with an incomplete set of observations and proceeds to the likeliest possible explanation for the set. Abductive reasoning yields the kind of daily decision-making that does its best with the information at hand, which often is incomplete. A medical diagnosis is an application of abductive reasoning: given this set of symptoms,…
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Prediction: multi-scale pattern completion of the future
The notion of the brain as a prediction machine has been extremely influential and productive in cognitive sciences.One prominent framework is of a “Bayesian brain” that explicitly generates predictions and uses resultant errors to guide adaptation. The prediction-generation component of this framework may involve little more than a pattern completion process. Brain-like systems can get…
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Designing Ecosystems of Intelligence from First Principles
Karl Friston joins VERSES as Chief Scientist to Lead New Era in Artificial Intelligence.VERSES published its research paper to arxiv.org to explore the applications and implications of Active Inference on the future of Artificial Intelligence. “Designing Ecosystems of Intelligence from First Principles” lays out a vision of research and development in the field of artificial intelligence…
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Beliefs and Inference
Beliefs are propositions about the true states of the world.Active inference—a process theory based on the free energy principle—describes how an agent forms and updates beliefs.The active inference framework posits that the agent (i) observes the world, (ii) infers the causes of the observations, and (iii) forms beliefs about the external states of the world.…
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Exploite to explore mentation while growing old
Changes in cognition, affect, and brain function combine to promote a shift in the nature of mentation in older adulthood, favoring exploitation of prior knowledge over exploratory search as the starting point for thought and action. In humans, the exploration versus exploitation trade-off has been extensively studied in young adults. Yet there is growing evidence that the determinants and…
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task-related information and form functional networks encode both sensory input and behavioral choice.
Cortical processing of task-relevant information enables recognition of behaviorally meaningful sensory events. How task-related information is represented within cortical networks by the activity of individual neurons and their functional interactions was investigates. A subset of neurons transiently encode sensory information used to inform behavioral choice. These neurons form functional networks in which information transmits sequentially.…