Action understanding and active inference

By Karl J. Friston, Jérémie Mattout, James M. Kilner. Biological cybernetics, 2011

631 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We have suggested that the mirror-neuron system might be usefully understood as implementing Bayes-optimal perception of actions emitted by oneself or others. To substantiate this claim, we present neuronal simulations that show the same representations can prescribe motor behavior and encode motor intentions during action–observation. These simulations are based on the free-energy formulation of active inference, which is formally related to predictive coding. In this scheme, (generalised) states of the world are represented as trajectories. When these states include motor trajectories they implicitly entail intentions (future motor states). Optimizing the representation of these intentions enables predictive coding in a prospective sense. Crucially, the same generative models used to make predictions can be deployed to predict the actions of self or others by simply changing the bias or precision (i.e. attention) afforded to proprioceptive signals. We illustrate these points using simulations of handwriting to illustrate neuronally plausible generation and recognition of itinerant (wandering) motor trajectories. We then use the same simulations to produce synthetic electrophysiological responses to violations of intentional expectations. Our results affirm that a Bayes-optimal approach provides a principled framework, which accommodates current thinking about the mirror-neuron system. Furthermore, it endorses the general formulation of action as active inference.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c4492b7114e520e5dd04582bd84b5bfee3b91610

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Citations in the corpus

Dopamine, Affordance and Active Inference (2012, methodology): “Action observation Action observation and mirror neurons [23]”
The graphical brain: Belief propagation and active inference (2017, background): “See K. Friston (2011) and K. Friston, Mattout, and Kilner (2011) for more details.”
Neural and Computational Mechanisms of Action Processing: Interaction between Visual and Motor Representations. (2015, methodology): “Another very inﬂuential Bayesian action recognition model has been proposed by Friston and colleagues (Friston et al., 2011; Kilner et al., 2007),based on the idea of ‘‘predictive coding’’ (Fris-ton, 2010).”
A Free Energy Principle for Biological Systems (2012, background): “Domain Process or paradigm Perception • Perceptual categorisation (bird songs) [18] • Novelty and omission-related responses [18] • Perceptual inference (speech) [19] Sensory learning • Perceptual learning (mismatch negativity) [33] Attention • Attention and the Posner paradigm [20] • Attention and ”
Perceptions as Hypotheses: Saccades as Experiments (2012, neutral): “Motor trajectories and place cells (Friston et al., 2011)”
Spatiotemporal Movement Planning and Rapid Adaptation for Manual Interaction (2013, background): “, [38,39]), detailed models of how such theoretical mechanisms may operate together to yield motor action for concrete examples involving action observation are rare (for an exception see [40]).”
Action Is Enabled by Systematic Misrepresentations (2017, background): “…prediction errors to function as motor commands,5 their associated precision must be high enough: facilitating the spinal reflex (Adams et al., 2013; Friston et al., 2011); conversely, the precision can be attenuated (cf. sensory attenuation) during action observation (Friston et al., 2011).”
Vanilla PP for Philosophers: A Primer on Predictive Processing (2017, background): “Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958573024 10 | 18 Following Friston et al. (Friston et al. 2011, p. 138), N could function both as a percept and as an intent, though it usually only functions as one of them.”
The free energy principle made simpler but not too simple (2022, neutral): “Please see [97] for further details. view, the solenoidal flow can be regarded as circumnavigating the contours of the steady-state density to find a path of steepest descent.”
The role of prediction in social neuroscience (2012, background): “This has been demonstrated with simulations of handwriting that artificially produce electrophysiological responses to movement expectation violations (Friston et al., 2011).”
A free energy principle for a particular physics (2019, background): “Please see (Friston et al., 2011) for further details.”
The anticipating brain is not a scientist: the free-energy principle from an ecological-enactive perspective (2016, background): “24 As originally conceived, active inference (Friston et al. 2011) subsumes both perception and action.”
Neural Elements for Predictive Coding (2016, background): “The terms of reference for this enquiry will be limited to sensory inference, omitting the extension of gPC theory to motor systems (Friston et al., 2011).”