Butz, M. V., Mittenbühler, M., Schwöbel, S., Achimova, A., Gumbsch, C., Otte, S., & Kiebel, S. (2024). Contextualizing predictive minds. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 105948.
A theoretical framework for understanding human cognition, centered on the idea that the brain's structure and processing are optimized for efficient prediction, planning, and behavior through a tripartite organization of long-term memory into concepts, events, and contexts. This hierarchical world model facilitates contextualization, which acts as a dynamic spotlight, pre-activating relevant environmental features and setting priors that constrain cognitive processes. Employing a predictive coding perspective, the authors suggest that the brain constructs and infers contexts—rather than passively observing them—to solve the frame problem by focusing on task-relevant aspects, thereby enabling deeper planning, faster decision-making, and reduced cognitive effort. This model emphasizes the role of active inference in learning and behavior, driven by a combination of minimizing cognitive effort and maximizing the likelihood of favorable outcomes, guided by phylogenetically optimized inductive biases embedded within a hierarchical structure.
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