Prediction, Cognition and the Brain

By Andreja Bubić, D. von Cramon, Ricarda I. Schubotz. 2009

636 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The term “predictive brain” depicts one of the most relevant concepts in cognitive neuroscience which emphasizes the importance of “looking into the future”, namely prediction, preparation, anticipation, prospection or expectations in various cognitive domains. Analogously, it has been suggested that predictive processing represents one of the fundamental principles of neural computations and that errors of prediction may be crucial for driving neural and cognitive processes as well as behavior. This review discusses research areas which have recognized the importance of prediction and introduces the relevant terminology and leading theories in the field in an attempt to abstract some generative mechanisms of predictive processing. Furthermore, we discuss the process of testing the validity of postulated expectations by matching these to the realized events and compare the subsequent processing of events which confirm to those which violate the initial predictions. We conclude by suggesting that, although a lot is known about this type of processing, there are still many open issues which need to be resolved before a unified theory of predictive processing can be postulated with regard to both cognitive and neural functioning.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology, Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximization (2018, background): “At a conscious level, intelligent agents make predictions and plans not at the level of pixels and other sensors, but at the level of abstract representations (Bubic et al., 2010).”
Visual Foresight: Model-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Robotic Control (2018, background): “Prediction is often considered a fundamental component of intelligence [5].”
Stochastic Variational Video Prediction (2017, background): “Understanding the interaction dynamics of objects and predicting what happens next is one of the key capabilities of humans which we heavily rely on to make decisions in everyday life (Bubic et al., 2010).”
The hardware lottery (2020, methodology): “What we see is largely virtual reality computed from memory (Eagleman & Sejnowski, 2000; Bubic et al., 2010; Heeger, 2017).”
A review of predictive coding algorithms. (2017, background): “Predictive coding suggests one way in which the brain might apply constraints in order to solve the inverse problem of perception (Bubic, von Cramon, & Schubotz, 2010; Clark, 2013; Huang & Rao, 2011; Rao & Ballard, 1999; Spratling, 2014a).”
The role of prediction in social neuroscience (2012, result): “As evident from many of the studies mentioned in this article, there is substantial overlap between the “predictive” brain (see Bubic et al., 2010) and the “social” brain (e.g., Abu-Akel and Shamay-Tsoory, 2011), including areas such as the DLPFC, MPFC, DMPFC, ACC, TPJ, OFC, medial temporal areas,…”
Stochastic Image-to-Video Synthesis using cINNs (2021, background): “[9] Andreja Bubic, D Yves von Cramon, and Ricarda I”
Transferable Representation Learning in Vision-and-Language Navigation (2019, background): “Research in sensory and motor processing suggests that the human brain predicts (anticipates) future states in order to assist decision making [11, 5].”
Expectation and Surprise Determine Neural Population Responses in the Ventral Visual Stream (2010, background): “…predictions (based on internal forward models) and prediction errors may be a ubiquitous feature of cognition in the brain (Schultz and Dickinson, 2000; Bubic et al., 2010; Friston, 2010) rather than a curiosity of reward learning (Schultz et al., 1997) or motor planning (Wolpert and Kawato, 1998).”
Predicting the Future from First Person (Egocentric) Vision: A Survey (2021, methodology): “Speciﬁcally, we consider the terminology introduced by [13] to deﬁne the taxonomy introduced in Table 1.”
An Interoceptive Predictive Coding Model of Conscious Presence (2011, methodology): “Predictive coding is a powerful framework for conceiving of the neural mechanisms underlying perception, cognition, and action (Rao and Ballard, 1999; Bubic et al., 2010; Friston, 2010).”
Implicit stereotypes and the predictive brain: cognition and culture in “biased” person perception (2017, background): “Human perception operating according to Bayesian decision-making has been studied in both psychology and economics, so the predictive brain model is also referred to as the “Bayesian brain” (El-Gamal and Grether, 1995; Bubic et al., 2010).”