Communication as Socially Extended Active Inference: An Ecological Approach to Communicative Behavior

A cultural-ecosocial systems view for psychiatry

While contemporary psychiatry seeks the mechanisms of mental disorders in neurobiology, mental health problems clearly depend on developmental processes of learning and adaptation through ongoing interactions with the social environment. Symptoms or disorders emerge in specific social contexts and involve predicaments that cannot be fully characterized in terms of brain function but require a larger social-ecological view. Causal processes that result in mental health problems can begin anywhere within the extended system of body-person-environment. In particular, individuals' narrative self-construal, culturally mediated interpretations of symptoms and coping strategies as well as the responses of others in the social world contribute to the mechanisms of mental disorders, illness experience, and recovery. In this paper, we outline the conceptual basis and practical implications of a hierarchical ecosocial systems view for an integrative approach to psychiatric theory and practice. The cultural-ecosocial systems view we propose understands mind, brain and person as situated in the social world and as constituted by cultural and self-reflexive processes. This view can be incorporated into a pragmatic approach to clinical assessment and case formulation that characterizes mechanisms of pathology and identifies targets for intervention.

Interpersonal attunement in social interactions: from collective psychophysiology to inter-personalized psychiatry and beyond

In this article, we analyse social interactions, drawing on diverse points of views, ranging from dialectics, second-person neuroscience and enactivism to dynamical systems, active inference and machine learning. To this end, we define interpersonal attunement as a set of multi-scale processes of building up and materializing social expectations-put simply, anticipating and interacting with others and ourselves. While cultivating and negotiating common ground, via communication and culture-building activities, are indispensable for the survival of the individual, the relevant multi-scale mechanisms have been largely considered in isolation. Here, collective psychophysiology, we argue, can lend itself to the fine-tuned analysis of social interactions, without neglecting the individual. On the other hand, an interpersonal mismatch of expectations can lead to a breakdown of communication and social isolation known to negatively affect mental health. In this regard, we review psychopathology in terms of interpersonal misattunement, conceptualizing psychiatric disorders as disorders of social interaction, to describe how individual mental health is inextricably linked to social interaction. By doing so, we foresee avenues for an inter-personalized psychiatry, which moves from a static spectrum of disorders to a dynamic relational space, focusing on how the multi-faceted processes of social interaction can help to promote mental health. This article is part of the theme issue 'Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences'.

Enacting Gender: An Enactive-Ecological Account of Gender and Its Fluidity

This paper aims to show that genders are enacted, by providing an account of how an individual can be said to enact a gender and explaining how, consequently, genders can be fluid. On the enactive-ecological view we defend, individuals first and foremost perceive the world as fields of affordances, that is, structured sets of action possibilities. Fields of natural affordances offer action possibilities because of the natural properties of organisms and environments. Handles offer graspability to humans because of physical-structural properties of handles and the anatomical-physiological properties of humans. Although humans live in fields of bodily, action, and cultural affordances, our work focuses on cultural affordances, where action possibilities are offered to individuals because of the normative responses of individuals in that culture. Knocking on a door affords entrance because knocking provides cultured individuals on the other side of the door an affordance to which they themselves behave normatively. Usually, behaving normatively in response to cultural affordances brings about sequences of perception-action loops, which we will call "scripts": for instance, closed doors afford knocking, which affords the individual inside opening the door, which affords an interpersonal meeting, which (may) afford entrance. Although the notion of script has a strong cognitivist flavor, one of the aims of the paper to provide an ecological account of scripts, to show that what cognitivists viewed as representations (or representational structures) are in fact environmentally structured perception-action loops. On our account of gender, gendered cultures build and maintain gendered cultural affordance landscapes, that is, landscapes in which the action possibilities individuals face are normed according to a specific body type or situation; most often (assigned) biological sex. Individuals enact a given gender when they come to perceive the affordances reserved for one gender by their culture and respond in the culturally normative way, thus enacting gendered sequences of perception-action loops (i.e., gendered scripts). With the shifting landscapes of cultural affordances brought about by several recent social, technological, and epistemic developments in some cultures, the gendered landscapes of affordances offered to individuals in these cultures have become more varied and less rigid, thus increasing the variety and flexibility of scripts individuals can enact. This entails that individuals in such cultures have an increased possibility for gender fluidity, which may in part explain the increasing number of people currently identifying outside the binary.

Epistemic Communities under Active Inference

The spread of ideas is a fundamental concern of today's news ecology. Understanding the dynamics of the spread of information and its co-option by interested parties is of critical importance. Research on this topic has shown that individuals tend to cluster in echo-chambers and are driven by confirmation bias. In this paper, we leverage the active inference framework to provide an in silico model of confirmation bias and its effect on echo-chamber formation. We build a model based on active inference, where agents tend to sample information in order to justify their own view of reality, which eventually leads to them to have a high degree of certainty about their own beliefs. We show that, once agents have reached a certain level of certainty about their beliefs, it becomes very difficult to get them to change their views. This system of self-confirming beliefs is upheld and reinforced by the evolving relationship between an agent's beliefs and observations, which over time will continue to provide evidence for their ingrained ideas about the world. The epistemic communities that are consolidated by these shared beliefs, in turn, tend to produce perceptions of reality that reinforce those shared beliefs. We provide an active inference account of this community formation mechanism. We postulate that agents are driven by the epistemic value that they obtain from sampling or observing the behaviours of other agents. Inspired by digital social networks like Twitter, we build a generative model in which agents generate observable social claims or posts (e.g., 'tweets') while reading the socially observable claims of other agents that lend support to one of two mutually exclusive abstract topics. Agents can choose which other agent they pay attention to at each timestep, and crucially who they attend to and what they choose to read influences their beliefs about the world. Agents also assess their local network's perspective, influencing which kinds of posts they expect to see other agents making. The model was built and simulated using the freely available Python package pymdp. The proposed active inference model can reproduce the formation of echo-chambers over social networks, and gives us insight into the cognitive processes that lead to this phenomenon.