Above and beyond the concrete: The diverse representational substrates of the predictive brain

Gilead, Michael; Trope, Yaacov; Liberman, Nira

doi:10.1017/s0140525x19002000

Cited by 105 publications

(88 citation statements)

References 352 publications

(414 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…There is some evidence that increasingly abstract language is used to traverse increasingly large spatial and temporal distances: the abstractness of natural language use on Twitter5 increases as a function of the spatial distance between an individual tweeter and a referent location, and as a function of the temporal distance between the present and a referenced point in time (Snefjella & Kuperman, 2015). This accords with work in other domains suggesting that abstraction functions to support "mental travel" across progressively greater spatial and temporal distances (see Gilead et al, 2019;Trope & Liberman, 2010). And if, as we conjecture, the recruitment of top-down control mechanisms in learning and processing abstract concepts has to do, at least in part, with the duration and variability of this spatiotemporal window, then the dynamic activity of the mPFC-HPC network should track a measure of this window in online situated conceptualization-with greater engagement of the network when recognizing a concept whose constituent features are usually more dispersed through space and/or time.…”

Section: Implications For Situated Conceptualizationmentioning

confidence: 62%

Situational systematicity: A role for schema in understanding the differences between abstract and concrete concepts

Davis

Altmann

Yee

2020

Cognitive Neuropsychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

concepts differ from concrete concepts in a number of ways. Here, we focus on what we refer to as situational systematicity: The objects and relations that constitute an abstract concept (e.g., justice) are more dispersed through space and time than are the objects and relations that typically constitute a concrete concept (e.g., chair); a larger set of objects and relations might potentially constitute an abstract concept than a concrete one; and exactly which objects and relations constitute a concept is likely more context-dependent for abstract than for concrete concepts. We thus refer to abstract concepts as having low situational systematicity. We contend that situational systematicity, rather than abstractness per se, may be a critical determinant of the cognitive, behavioral, and neural phenomena typically associated with concepts. We also contend that investigating concepts through the lens of schema provides insight into the situation-based dynamics of concept learning and representation, and into the functional significance of the interactions between brain regions that make up the schema control network.

show abstract

Section: Implications For Situated Conceptualizationmentioning

confidence: 62%

Situational systematicity: A role for schema in understanding the differences between abstract and concrete concepts

Davis

Altmann

Yee

2020

Cognitive Neuropsychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…More broadly, the analogies between geometric spaces and cognitive ones needs to be explored further, as is beginning to be done via geometric information theory (Balduzzi and Tononi, 2009;Oizumi et al, 2016;Sengupta et al, 2016;Calcagni, 2018). Indeed, the notion of spaces with different geometry has been pursued both in the neuroscience of perception and representation (Zhou et al, 2018b;Gilead et al, 2019) and in developmental biology of patterning (Jaeger et al, 2008;Jaeger and Monk, 2014). It may even be possible to go backwards, asking what cognitive structure accompanies a particular space-time geometry -a concept that might have been presaged by Newton's concept of space being the "Sensorium of God".…”

Section: Predictions and Research Programmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Computational Boundary of a “Self”: Developmental Bioelectricity Drives Multicellularity and Scale-Free Cognition

2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

All epistemic agents physically consist of parts that must somehow comprise an integrated cognitive self. Biological individuals consist of subunits (organs, cells, and molecular networks) that are themselves complex and competent in their own native contexts. How do coherent biological Individuals result from the activity of smaller sub-agents? To understand the evolution and function of metazoan creatures' bodies and minds, it is essential to conceptually explore the origin of multicellularity and the scaling of the basal cognition of individual cells into a coherent larger organism. In this article, I synthesize ideas in cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and developmental physiology toward a hypothesis about the origin of Individuality: "Scale-Free Cognition." I propose a fundamental definition of an Individual based on the ability to pursue goals at an appropriate level of scale and organization and suggest a formalism for defining and comparing the cognitive capacities of highly diverse types of agents. Any Self is demarcated by a computational surface -the spatio-temporal boundary of events that it can measure, model, and try to affect. This surface sets a functional boundarya cognitive "light cone" which defines the scale and limits of its cognition. I hypothesize that higher level goal-directed activity and agency, resulting in larger cognitive boundaries, evolve from the primal homeostatic drive of living things to reduce stress -the difference between current conditions and life-optimal conditions. The mechanisms of developmental bioelectricity -the ability of all cells to form electrical networks that process informationsuggest a plausible set of gradual evolutionary steps that naturally lead from physiological homeostasis in single cells to memory, prediction, and ultimately complex cognitive agents, via scale-up of the basic drive of infotaxis. Recent data on the molecular mechanisms of pre-neural bioelectricity suggest a model of how increasingly sophisticated cognitive functions emerge smoothly from cell-cell communication used to guide embryogenesis and regeneration. This set of hypotheses provides a novel perspective on numerous phenomena, such as cancer, and makes several unique, testable predictions for interdisciplinary research that have implications not only for evolutionary developmental biology but also for biomedicine and perhaps artificial intelligence and exobiology.

show abstract

“…For our theory, we have chosen the name many-to-one to depict the reduction in counterfactual or temporal depth 1 (Corcoran et al, 2019)-the tendency to abstract away from the present moment (Gilead et al, 2019)-that occurs during meditation. There is widespread agreement that information is represented hierarchically in the brain, with early layers of the hierarchy being more temporally precise and concrete, and higher layers being more temporally thick and abstract (Friston, 2008;Huntenburg et al, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From many to (n)one: Meditation and the plasticity of the predictive mind

Laukkonen¹,

Slagter²

2020

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

How profoundly can humans change their own minds? In this paper we offer a unifying account of meditation under the predictive processing view of living organisms. We start from relatively simple axioms. First, the brain is an organ that serves to predict based on past experience, both phylogenetic and ontogenetic. Second, meditation serves to bring one closer to the here and now by disengaging from anticipatory processes. We propose that practicing meditation therefore gradually reduces predictive processing, in particular counterfactual cognition—the tendency to construct abstract and temporally deep representations—until all conceptual processing falls away. Our Many-to-One account also places three main styles of meditation (focused attention, open monitoring, and non-dual meditation) on a single continuum, where each technique progressively relinquishes increasingly engrained habits of prediction, including the self. This deconstruction can also make the above processes more transparent to awareness, permitting certain insights into one’s mind. Our review suggests that our framework is consistent with the current state of empirical and (neuro)phenomenological evidence in contemplative science, and is ultimately illuminating about the plasticity of the predictive mind. It also serves to highlight that contemplative science can fruitfully go beyond cognitive enhancement, attention, and emotion regulation, to its more traditional goal of removing past conditioning and creating conditions for potentially profound insights. Experimental rigor, neurophenomenology, and no-report paradigms combined with neuroimaging are needed to further our understanding of how different styles of meditation affect predictive processing and the self, and the plasticity of the predictive mind more generally.

show abstract

Above and beyond the concrete: The diverse representational substrates of the predictive brain

Cited by 105 publications

References 352 publications

Situational systematicity: A role for schema in understanding the differences between abstract and concrete concepts

Situational systematicity: A role for schema in understanding the differences between abstract and concrete concepts

The Computational Boundary of a “Self”: Developmental Bioelectricity Drives Multicellularity and Scale-Free Cognition

From many to (n)one: Meditation and the plasticity of the predictive mind

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About