This short letter is a response to a recent Forum article in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, by Sun and Firestone, which reprises the so-called 'Dark Room Problem' as a challenge to the explanatory value of predictive processing and free-energy-minimisation frameworks for cognitive science. Among many possible responses to Sun and Firestone, we explain how minimisatin of prediction error in the long term (expected free energy) naturally prescribes the sort of epistemic, curious actions that lead to escaping from dark rooms.

This paper presents an active inference based simulation study of visual foraging and transfer learning. The goal of the simulation is to show the effect of the acquisition of culturally patterned attention styles on cognitive task performance, under active inference. We show how cultural artifacts like antique vase decorations drive cognitive functions such as perception, action and learning, as well as task performance in a simple visual discrimination task. We thus describe a new active inference based research pipeline that future work may employ to inquire on deep guiding principles determining the manner in which material culture drives human thought, by building and rebuilding our patterns of attention.

Fixational eye movements are ubiquitous and have a large impact on visual perception. Although their physical characteristics and, to some extent, neural underpinnings are well documented, their function, with the exception of preventing visual fading, remains poorly understood. In this paper, we propose that the visual system might utilize the relatively large number of similar slightly jittered images produced by fixational eye movements to help learn robust and spatially invariant representations as a form of neural data augmentation. Additionally, we form a link between effects such as retinal stabilization and predictive processing theory, and argue that they may be best explained under such a paradigm.