Category: Active Inference
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Interoception and Active Inference for mental health
Interoception refers to the process by which the nervous system senses and integrates signals originating from within the body, providing a momentary mapping of the body’s internal landscape and its relationship to the outside world. Active inference is based on the premise that afferent sensory input to the brain is constantly shaped and modified by…
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Conceptual Bootstrapping (human cognition)
To tackle a hard problem, it is often wise to reuse and recombine existing knowledge. Such an ability to bootstrap enables us to grow rich mental concepts despite limited cognitive resources. This article presents a computational model of conceptual bootstrapping. This model uses a dynamic conceptual repertoire that can cache and later reuse elements of…
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Puzzled …? – Consider the Bayesian brain hypothesis!
Dysfunctional breathing disorder(s) (DBD) is an umbrella term for a set of poorly distinguishable clinical conditions including the most emblematic and anciently known hyperventilation syndrome. DBD affects in a variable proportion (between 5 and 35%) both adults and children, with a highly negative impact on health-related quality of life. DBD is consensually considered as a…
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Bayesian models of perception and action (free e-book)
Bayesian models of perception and action An introduction By Wei Ji Ma, Konrad Kording, and Daniel Goldreich An accessible introduction to constructing and interpreting Bayesian models of perceptual decision-making and action. Many forms of perception and action can be mathematically modeled as probabilistic — or Bayesian — inference, a method used to draw conclusions from…
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“Fitness” Beats “Truth”
The “Fitness-Beats-Truth Theorem” provides a quantitative measure of the extent to which the fitness-only strategy dominates the truth strategy, and of how this dominance increases with the size of the perceptual space. The FBT Theorem supports the Interface Theory of Perception. The Interface Theory of Perception is discussed and described in detail in 2015 by…
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The Physics of Survival
Please enjoy the fascinating discussion of the free energy principle with Dr. Maxwell Ramstead, a leading thinker exploring the intersection of math, physics, and philosophy and Director of Research at VERSES. The 2 hour discussion includes great details on FEP. The FEP was proposed by renowned neuroscientist Karl Friston, this principle offers a unifying theory…
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Decoding reward–curiosity conflict in decision-making from irrational behaviors
Humans and animals are not always rational. “Decoding reward–curiosity conflict in decision-making from irrational behaviors” discusses the fact humans not only rationally exploit rewards but also explore an environment owing to their curiosity. However, the mechanism of such curiosity-driven irrational behavior is largely unknown. The article develops a decision-making model for a two choice task…
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Creativity in Motion
Some publications related to this topic: Embodiment and Human Development It is becoming increasingly accepted that the study of cognitive, social, and emotional processes must account for the embodiment of these processes in living, acting people. Within cognitive science, how bodily factors play a role in mental life is often considered through the lens of…
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Social and Affective Neuroscience of Everyday Human Interaction
I found – rather serendipitous – this recent, open access and very interesting book “Social and Affective Neuroscience of Everyday Human Interaction“, edited by Springer 2023. This Open Access book presents the current state of the art knowledge on social and affective neuroscience based on empirical findings. Some highlights as appetiser: Molecular Imaging of the…
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Bayesian Nonlinear Models
The review article Bayesian Nonlinear Models for Repeated Measurement Data gives a valuation of the use for the Bayesian Model to solve complex problems. Nonlinear mixed effects models have become a standard platform for analysis when data is in the form of continuous and repeated measurements of subjects from a population of interest, while temporal…
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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.…
