Self-organization, free energy minimization, and optimal grip on a field of affordances

Young people on social media in a globalized world: self-optimization in highly competitive and achievement-oriented forms of life

Research investigating young people's social media use has been criticized for its limited theoretical foundations and scope. This paper elaborates young people's social media activity from a socio-ecological evolutionary perspective (SEE), where young people's online exchanges cannot be divorced from the highly competitive and achievement-oriented modern market cultures in which they live. In highly competitive and achievement-oriented forms of life, young people's social media environments are often constituted as dynamic and evolving extrinsically oriented ecological niches that afford for status and identity enhancement while also affording for peer approval, belongingness, and self-worth nested within, and subordinate to, these higher-order affordances. The extrinsic value organization of social media platforms that serve young people's status and identity-enhancement are embodied by a community of mutually interdependent criteria that are evolutionary-based, developmentally salient, and market-driven: physical attractiveness, high (educational and extracurricular) achievements, and material success. Young people's online signaling of these interdependent extrinsic criteria affords for status-allocation and self-enhancement, where each criteria becomes an arena for social competition and identity formation, enabling young people to build personal and optimal models of social success congruent with their own interests and abilities. Young people's status and identity enhancing signaling of these extrinsic criteria is moving toward increasingly idealized or perfect embodiments, informed by accelerating, short-term positive feedback processes that benefit from the technological affordances and densely rewarding peer environments instantiated on social media.

Higher order affordances

Affordances are opportunities for action for a given animal (or animals) in a given environment or situation. The concept of affordance has been widely adopted in the behavioral sciences, but important questions remain. We propose a new way of understanding the nature of affordances; in particular, how affordances are related to one another. We claim that many - perhaps most - affordances emerge from non-additive relations among other affordances, such that some affordances are of higher order relative to other affordances. That is, we propose that affordances form a continuous category of perceiveables that differ only in whether and how they relate to other affordances. We argue that: (1) opportunities for behaviors of all kinds can be described as affordances, (2) some affordances emerge from relations between animal and environment, whereas most affordances emerge from relations between other affordances, and (3) all affordances lawfully structure ambient energy arrays and, therefore, can be perceived directly. Our concept of higher order affordances provides a general account of behavioral phenomena that traditionally have been interpreted in terms of cognitive processes (e.g., remembering or imagining) as well as behavioral phenomena that have traditionally been interpreted in terms of cultural rules, such as conventions, or customs.

Forgetting ourselves in flow: an active inference account of flow states and how we experience ourselves within them

Flow has been described as a state of optimal performance, experienced universally across a broad range of domains: from art to athletics, gaming to writing. However, its phenomenal characteristics can, at first glance, be puzzling. Firstly, individuals in flow supposedly report a loss of self-awareness, even though they perform in a manner which seems to evince their agency and skill. Secondly, flow states are felt to be effortless, despite the prerequisite complexity of the tasks that engender them. In this paper, we unpick these features of flow, as well as others, through the active inference framework, which posits that action and perception are forms of active Bayesian inference directed at sustained self-organisation; i.e., the minimisation of variational free energy. We propose that the phenomenology of flow is rooted in the deployment of high precision weight over (i) the expected sensory consequences of action and (ii) beliefs about how action will sequentially unfold. This computational mechanism thus draws the embodied cognitive system to minimise the ensuing (i.e., expected) free energy through the exploitation of the pragmatic affordances at hand. Furthermore, given the challenging dynamics the flow-inducing situation presents, attention must be wholly focussed on the unfolding task whilst counterfactual planning is restricted, leading to the attested loss of the sense of self-as-object. This involves the inhibition of both the sense of self as a temporally extended object and higher-order, meta-cognitive forms of self-conceptualisation. Nevertheless, we stress that self-awareness is not entirely lost in flow. Rather, it is pre-reflective and bodily. Our approach to bodily-action-centred phenomenology can be applied to similar facets of seemingly agentive experience beyond canonical flow states, providing insights into the mechanisms of so-called selfless experiences, embodied expertise and wellbeing.

What affords being creative? Opportunities for novelty in light of perception, embodied activity, and imaginative skill

An affordance perspective highlights how resourceful the ecology is for creative actions of all sorts; it captures how creativity is grounded in materiality. In contrast to "canonical affordances" (i.e., "ready-to-hand," mundane instances), creative affordances point to unconventional or surprising action opportunities that are nonetheless valued. Our initial aim is to discuss how to frame the affordance concept to make it attractive for the study of creativity. We propose a dialectic position that reconciles aspects of the realism of ecological psychology with the constructivist view more typical of creativity scholars. We stress that novel options frequently depend on constructive actions; novelty cannot always simply be "found" or just waits to be used. Many creative opportunities only emerge from how person actively engages with the ecology. Our second aim is to explore specific ways that creativity is mediated through affordances, based on illustrations from crafts and dance. These suggest that affordances span various timescales and mediate in multiple ways, from noticing existing potentials, via active affordance shaping, to background activities that indirectly invite or enable novelty. In conclusion we discuss how a person's creative "vision," imagination and combinatoric ability, all fundamental creativity mechanisms, relate to affordances and how fruitful creative directions may be perceptually hinted at.

Adapting Ourselves, Instead of the Environment: An Inquiry into Human Enhancement for Function and Beyond

Technology enables humans not only to adapt their environment to their needs but also to modify themselves. Means of Human Enhancement - embodied technologies to improve the human body's capabilities or to create a new one - are the designated means of adapting ourselves instead of the environment. The debate about these technologies is typically fought on ethical soil. However, alarmist, utopian, and science fiction scenarios distract from the fact that Human Enhancement is a historical and pervasive phenomenon incorporated into many everyday practices. In the vein of disentangling conceptual difficulties, we claim that means of Human Enhancement are either physiologically or psychologically embodied, rendering the merging with the human user their most defining aspect. To fulfill its purpose, an enhancement must pass the test-in-the-world, i.e., assisting with effective engagement with a dynamic world. Even if failing in this regard: Human Enhancement is the fundamental and semi-targeted process of changing the users relationship with the world through the physical or psychological embodiment of a hitherto external object and/or change of one's body. This can potentially change the notion of being human. Drawing on a rich body of theoretical and empirical literature, we aim to provide a nuanced analysis of the transformative nature of this phenomenon in close proximity to human practice. Stakeholders are invited to apply the theory presented here to interrogate their perspective on technology in general and Human Enhancement in particular.

There is no copy and paste, but there is resonation and inhabitation: Integrating a contemporary player development framework in football from a complexity sciences perspective

Socio-cultural constraints shape behaviour in complexifying ways. In sport, for example, interconnected constraints play an important role in shaping the way a game is played, coached, and spectated. Here, we contend that player development frameworks in sport cannot be operationalised without careful consideration of the complex ecosystem in which they reside. Concurrently, we highlight issues associated with frameworks designed in isolation from the contexts in which they are introduced for integration, guised as trying to "copy and paste" templates from country to country. As such, there is a need to understand the oft-shrouded socio-cultural dynamics that continuously influence practice in order to maximize the utility of player development frameworks in sport. Ecological dynamics offers a complexity-oriented theoretical lens that supports the evolution of context-dependent player development frameworks. Further, tenets of the Learning in Development Research Framework can show how affordances are not just material invitations but constitute a vital component of a broader socio-cultural form of life. These ideas have the potential to: (1) push against a desire to "copy and paste" what is perceived to be "successful" elsewhere, and (2), guide the integration of player development frameworks by learning to resonate with the nuanced complexities of the broader environment inhabited.

A systematic review of perception of affordances for the person-plus-object system

Human behavior often involves the use of an object held by or attached to the body, which modifies the individual's action capabilities. Moreover, most everyday behaviors consist of sets of behaviors that are nested over multiple spatial and temporal scales, which require perceiving and acting on nested affordances for the person-plus-object system. This systematic review investigates how individuals attune to information about affordances involving the person-plus-object system and how they (re)calibrate their actions to relevant information. We analyzed 71 articles-34 on attunement and 37 on (re)calibration with healthy participants-that experimentally investigated the processes involved in the perception of affordances for the person-plus-object system (including attunement, calibration, and recalibration). With respect to attunement, objects attached to the body create a multiplicity of affordances for the person-plus-object system, and individuals learned (1) to detect information about affordances of (and for) the person-plus-object system in a task and (2) to choose whether, when, and how to exploit those affordances to perform that task. Concerning (re)calibration, individuals were able (1) to quickly scale their actions in relation to the (changed) action capabilities of the person-plus-object system and (2) to perceive multiple functionally equivalent ways to exploit the affordances of that system, and these abilities improved with practice. Perceiving affordances for the person-plus-object system involves learning to detect the information about such affordances (attunement) and the scaling of behaviors to such information (calibration). These processes imply a general ability to incorporate an object attached to the body into an integrated person-plus-object system.

The phenomenological model of depression: from methodological challenges to clinical advancements

In this article our overall aim is to illustrate how phenomenological psychopathology can advance the clinical work on depression. To do so, we start by unfolding the current phenomenological model of depression. We argue that this model faces a methodological challenge, which we define as 'the challenge of patho-description'. Mental disorders, such as depression, influence how people are able to access and describe their own experiences. This becomes a challenge for phenomenological psychopathology since its methodology is based on people's ability to describe their own experiences. To deal with this challenge, in the case of depression, we turn to the framework of phenomenological interview. We interview 12 participants (7 women, 5 men, age-range from 29 to 57 years) with moderate and severe depression. From the interview results, we show how phenomenological interview deals with the challenge of patho-description and how patho-description in depression conceals experiential nuances. We unfold these nuances and describe how people with depression pre-reflectively experience a variety of feelings, a type of agency, overly positive self-image, and relations in a hyper-social way. These descriptive nuances not only strengthen the phenomenological model of depression, but they also help advance the clinical work on depression. We firstly illustrate how the descriptive nuances can be added to current manuals and rating scales to advance diagnostic work. Secondly, we illustrate how phenomenological, 'bottom-up', and embodied approaches function at the pre-reflective level of experience, and that further effort at this level can help advance therapy for depression.

Relative fluency (unfelt vs felt) in active inference

For a growing number of researchers, it is now accepted that the brain is a predictive organ that predicts the content of the sensorium and crucially the precision of-or confidence in-its own predictions. In order to predict the precision of its predictions, the brain has to infer the reliability of its own beliefs. This means that our brains have to recognise the precision of their predictions or, at least, their accuracy. In this paper, we argue that fluency is product of this recognition process. In short, to recognise fluency is to infer that we have a precise 'grip' on the unfolding processes that generate our sensations. More specifically, we propose that it is changes in fluency - from unfelt to felt - that are both recognised and realised when updating predictions about precision. Unfelt fluency orients attention to unpredicted sensations, while felt fluency supervenes on-and contextualises-unfelt fluency; thereby rendering certain attentional processes, phenomenologically opaque. As such, fluency underwrites the precision we place in our predictions and therefore acts upon our perceptual inferences. Hence, the causes of conscious subjective inference have unconscious perceptual precursors.

Body as First Teacher: The Role of Rhythmic Visceral Dynamics in Early Cognitive Development

Embodied cognition-the idea that mental states and processes should be understood in relation to one's bodily constitution and interactions with the world-remains a controversial topic within cognitive science. Recently, however, increasing interest in predictive processing theories among proponents and critics of embodiment alike has raised hopes of a reconciliation. This article sets out to appraise the unificatory potential of predictive processing, focusing in particular on embodied formulations of active inference. Our analysis suggests that most active-inference accounts invoke weak, potentially trivial conceptions of embodiment; those making stronger claims do so independently of the theoretical commitments of the active-inference framework. We argue that a more compelling version of embodied active inference can be motivated by adopting a diachronic perspective on the way rhythmic physiological activity shapes neural development in utero. According to this visceral afferent training hypothesis, early-emerging physiological processes are essential not only for supporting the biophysical development of neural structures but also for configuring the cognitive architecture those structures entail. Focusing in particular on the cardiovascular system, we propose three candidate mechanisms through which visceral afferent training might operate: (a) activity-dependent neuronal development, (b) periodic signal modeling, and (c) oscillatory network coordination.

Affordance-based practice: An ecological-enactive approach to chronic musculoskeletal pain management

BACKGROUND

The biomedical understanding of chronic musculoskeletal pain endorses a linear relationship between noxious stimuli and pain, and is often dualist or reductionist. Although the biopsychosocial approach is an important advancement, it has a limited theoretical foundation. As such, it tends to be misinterpreted in manners that lead to artificial boundaries between the biological, psychological, and social, with fragmented and polarized clinical applications.

OBJECTIVE

We present an ecological-enactive approach to complement the biopsychosocial model. In this approach, the disabling aspect of chronic pain is characterized as an embodied, embedded, and enactive process of experiencing a closed-off field of affordances (i.e., shutting down of action possibilities). Pain is considered as a multi-dimensional, multicausal, and dynamic process, not locatable in any of the biopsychosocial component domains. Based on a person-centered reasoning approach and a dispositional view of causation, we present tools to reason about complex clinical problems in face of uncertainty and the absence of 'root causes' for pain. Interventions to open up the field of affordances include building ability and confidence, encouraging movement variability, carefully controlling contextual factors, and changing perceptions through action according to each patient's self-identified goals. A clinical case illustrates how reasoning based on an ecological-enactive approach leads to an expanded, multi-pronged, affordance-based intervention.

CONCLUSIONS

The ecological-enactive perspective can provide an overarching conceptual and practical framework for clinical practice, guiding and constraining clinicians to choose, combine, and integrate tools that are consistent with each other and with a true biopsychosocial approach.

An "in vivo" analysis of crafts practices and creativity-Why affordances provide a productive lens

Scholars are increasingly recognizing that creativity is grounded in the active sensorimotor engagement with the environment and materiality. Affordances-recognizable pointers to action opportunities in the ecology-provide a helpful prism for analyzing how this happens. Creative practitioners, as they seek aesthetic opportunities or innovation, depend on their sensitivity toward potentialities in their action space. Presently, we apply a high-zoom lens to a crafts process, giving our micro-genetic research design an affordance focus. By investigating one of the authors, a ceramicist and a practitioner-researcher, through her process of making of a vase, we tracked how affordances are responded to, developed, shaped, invited or, where necessary, rejected, as the ceramicist "routes" her creative trajectory. Several insights emerge: (1) The ceramicist's decisions-initially about general directions, then about aesthetic details-unfold while engaging with the clay; they emerge in stepwise fashion, but with a holistic orientation. (2) Choosing among affordances requires parallel sensitivities to object functionality, aesthetics and creativity, as well as technical feasibility; adhering to the proper technical procedure that provides the very basis for creatively relevant affordances to later arise. (3) While the hands and eyes engage with short-lived affordances the ceramicist must keep in view higher-timescale affordances that ensure a good task progression for making a vase, and affordances for the material's overall "workability". (4) The ceramicist typically relates to momentary affordances in light of expected as well as imagined others, to ensure a coherent end product. (5) Affordances contribute to material creativity in more ways than typically recognized in the literature. They range from serendipitous "finds" to options developed with a large degree of creative autonomy; affordances may also be indirectly invited and practitioners strategically change probability distributions as well as providing an enabling background for generative action. Thus, a crafts practitioner brings forth unconventional affordances through active engagement, using a mix of exploration, strategy, and imaginative potential. Affordance theorists err when stressing the possibility to just "find" creative options or that perceptual acuity is the sole skill.

A clinical practice review of therapeutic movement-based anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction return to sports bridge program: the biological, biomechanical and behavioral rationale

This clinical practice review describes the biological, biomechanical and behavioral rationale behind a return to sport bridge program used predominantly with non-elite, youth and adolescent high school and college athletes following anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction. Post-physiotherapy, this program has produced outcomes that meet or exceed previous reports. With consideration for athletic identity and the Specific Adaptations to Imposed Demands (SAID) principle, the early program focus was on restoring non-impaired bilateral lower extremity joint mobility and bi-articular musculotendinous extensibility. Building on this foundation, movement training education, fundamental bilateral lower extremity strength and power, and motor learning was emphasized with use of external focus cues and ecological dynamics-social cognition considerations. Plyometric and agility tasks were integrated to enhance fast twitch muscle fiber recruitment, anaerobic metabolic energy system function, and fatigue resistance. The ultimate goal was to achieve the lower extremity neuromuscular control and activation responsiveness needed for bilateral dynamic knee joint stability. The rationale and conceptual basis of selected movement tasks and general philosophy of care concepts are described and discussed in detail. Based on the previously reported efficacy of this movement-based therapeutic exercise program we recommend that supplemental programs such as this become standard practice following release from post-surgical physiotherapy and before return to sports decision-making.

Models of the Translation Process and the Free Energy Principle

Translation process research (TPR) has generated a large number of models that aim at explaining human translation processes. In this paper, I suggest an extension of the monitor model to incorporate aspects of relevance theory (RT) and to adopt the free energy principle (FEP) as a generative model to elucidate translational behaviour. The FEP-and its corollary, active inference-provide a general, mathematical framework to explain how organisms resist entropic erosion so as to remain within their phenotypic bounds. It posits that organisms reduce the gap between their expectations and observations by minimising a quantity called free energy. I map these concepts on the translation process and exemplify them with behavioural data. The analysis is based on the notion of translation units (TUs) which exhibit observable traces of the translator's epistemic and pragmatic engagement with their translation environment, (i.e., the text) that can be measured in terms of translation effort and effects. Sequences of TUs cluster into translation states (steady state, orientation, and hesitation). Drawing on active inference, sequences of translation states combine into translation policies that reduce expected free energy. I show how the notion of free energy is compatible with the concept of relevance, as developed in RT, and how essential concepts of the monitor model and RT can be formalised as deep temporal generative models that can be interpreted under a representationalist view, but also support a non-representationalist account.

Irruption Theory: A Novel Conceptualization of the Enactive Account of Motivated Activity

Cognitive science is lacking conceptual tools to describe how an agent's motivations, as such, can play a role in the generation of its behavior. The enactive approach has made progress by developing a relaxed naturalism, and by placing normativity at the core of life and mind; all cognitive activity is a kind of motivated activity. It has rejected representational architectures, especially their reification of the role of normativity into localized "value" functions, in favor of accounts that appeal to system-level properties of the organism. However, these accounts push the problem of reification to a higher level of description, given that the efficacy of agent-level normativity is completely identified with the efficacy of non-normative system-level activity, while assuming operational equivalency. To allow normativity to have its own efficacy, a new kind of nonreductive theory is proposed: irruption theory. The concept of irruption is introduced to indirectly operationalize an agent's motivated involvement in its activity, specifically in terms of a corresponding underdetermination of its states by their material basis. This implies that irruptions are associated with increased unpredictability of (neuro)physiological activity, and they should, hence, be quantifiable in terms of information-theoretic entropy. Accordingly, evidence that action, cognition, and consciousness are linked to higher levels of neural entropy can be interpreted as indicating higher levels of motivated agential involvement. Counterintuitively, irruptions do not stand in contrast to adaptive behavior. Rather, as indicated by artificial life models of complex adaptive systems, bursts of arbitrary changes in neural activity can facilitate the self-organization of adaptivity. Irruption theory therefore, makes it intelligible how an agent's motivations, as such, can make effective differences to their behavior, without requiring the agent to be able to directly control their body's neurophysiological processes.

How the conception of control influences our understanding of actions

Wilful movement requires neural control. Commonly, neural computations are thought to generate motor commands that bring the musculoskeletal system - that is, the plant - from its current physical state into a desired physical state. The current state can be estimated from past motor commands and from sensory information. Modelling movement on the basis of this concept of plant control strives to explain behaviour by identifying the computational principles for control signals that can reproduce the observed features of movements. From an alternative perspective, movements emerge in a dynamically coupled agent-environment system from the pursuit of subjective perceptual goals. Modelling movement on the basis of this concept of perceptual control aims to identify the controlled percepts and their coupling rules that can give rise to the observed characteristics of behaviour. In this Perspective, we discuss a broad spectrum of approaches to modelling human motor control and their notions of control signals, internal models, handling of sensory feedback delays and learning. We focus on the influence that the plant control and the perceptual control perspective may have on decisions when modelling empirical data, which may in turn shape our understanding of actions.

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'.

Corrigendum: Bringing forth within: Enhabiting at the intersection between enaction and ecological psychology

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01348.].

Being a team player: Approaching team coordination in sports in dialog with ecological and praxeological approaches

This paper discusses key conceptual resources for an understanding of coordination processes in team sports. It begins by exploring the action guidance provided by the environment, studied in terms of affordances. When conceptualizing sporting performances in general, we might distinguish social and object affordances, think about the spatial and temporal order of affordances in terms of nested and sequential affordances, and differentiate between global, main, and micro-affordances within an action sequence. In the context of team sports, it is crucial to understand how affordances might be given to a plurality of athletes. For that purpose, the paper defines shared, common, and collective affordances. A distinguishing characteristic of team sports is the key role of collaborative intra-team coordination which take place within a setting of antagonistic team-team interactions. A key proposal from dynamical systems theory is to conceptualize intra-team coordination in terms of synergies. Synergies are emergent systems of several athletes who coordinate their movements to achieve specific performance tasks. Many of the embodied skills that players need to develop to become suitable participants in the coordination processes of sport teams are abilities to participate in dynamic sequences of collective activity. Praxeological approaches have emphasized that training processes in team sports are aimed at transforming athletes into skillful participants in sequences of collective play. Athletes need to develop their ability-to-play-with to become proficient in contributing to the formation of suitable collectives for specific performance tasks.

Maximising Grip on Deception and Disguise: Expert Sports Performance During Competitive Interactions

Expert performers in fast-ball and combat sports continuously interact with their opponents and, if they are to be successful, adapt behaviour in order to gain an advantage. For example, disguise and deception are recognised as skilful behaviours that are employed to disrupt an opponent’s ability to successfully anticipate their actions. We contend that such skilled behaviour unfolds during the interaction between opposing players, yet typical research approaches omit and/or artificially script these interactions. To promote the study of skilled behaviour as it emerges during competitive interactions, we offer an account informed by contemporary ecological perspectives for shaping investigation into how deception and disguise can be used to gain an advantage over an opponent and the challenges it poses to anticipation. We propose that each player attempts to develop maximum grip on the interaction through exploiting information across multiple timescales to position themselves as to facilitate openness to relevant affordances. The act of deception can be understood as offering a misleading affordance that an opponent is invited to act on, imposing a significant challenge to an opponent’s ability to attain grip by manipulating the information available. Grounded in our ecological perspective, we emphasise the need for future investigation into: (1) the role of disguise for disrupting anticipation; (2) how deception can be employed to gain an advantage by manipulating information on multiple timescales, before detailing; (3) how opposing performers go beyond merely exploiting information and actively elicit information to deal with deception and disguise during an interaction.

The Emperor Is Naked: Replies to commentaries on the target article

The 35 commentaries cover a wide range of topics and take many different stances on the issues explored by the target article. We have organised our response to the commentaries around three central questions: Are Friston blankets just Pearl blankets? What ontological and metaphysical commitments are implied by the use of Friston blankets? What kind of explanatory work are Friston blankets capable of? We conclude our reply with a short critical reflection on the indiscriminate use of both Markov blankets and the free energy principle.

Learned uncertainty: The free energy principle in anxiety

Generalized anxiety disorder is among the world’s most prevalent psychiatric disorders and often manifests as persistent and difficult to control apprehension. Despite its prevalence, there is no integrative, formal model of how anxiety and anxiety disorders arise. Here, we offer a perspective derived from the free energy principle; one that shares similarities with established constructs such as learned helplessness. Our account is simple: anxiety can be formalized as learned uncertainty. A biological system, having had persistent uncertainty in its past, will expect uncertainty in its future, irrespective of whether uncertainty truly persists. Despite our account’s intuitive simplicity—which can be illustrated with the mere flip of a coin—it is grounded within the free energy principle and hence situates the formation of anxiety within a broader explanatory framework of biological self-organization and self-evidencing. We conclude that, through conceptualizing anxiety within a framework of working generative models, our perspective might afford novel approaches in the clinical treatment of anxiety and its key symptoms.

Machines That Feel and Think: The Role of Affective Feelings and Mental Action in (Artificial) General Intelligence

What role do affective feelings (feelings/emotions/moods) play in adaptive behaviour? What are the implications of this for understanding and developing artificial general intelligence? Leading theoretical models of brain function are beginning to shed light on these questions. While artificial agents have excelled within narrowly circumscribed and specialised domains, domain-general intelligence has remained an elusive goal in artificial intelligence research. By contrast, humans and nonhuman animals are characterised by a capacity for flexible behaviour and general intelligence. In this article I argue that computational models of mental phenomena in predictive processing theories of the brain are starting to reveal the mechanisms underpinning domain-general intelligence in biological agents, and can inform the understanding and development of artificial general intelligence. I focus particularly on approaches to computational phenomenology in the active inference framework. Specifically, I argue that computational mechanisms of affective feelings in active inference-affective self-modelling-are revealing of how biological agents are able to achieve flexible behavioural repertoires and general intelligence. I argue that (i) affective self-modelling functions to "tune" organisms to the most tractable goals in the environmental context; and (ii) affective and agentic self-modelling is central to the capacity to perform mental actions in goal-directed imagination and creative cognition. I use this account as a basis to argue that general intelligence of the level and kind found in biological agents will likely require machines to be implemented with analogues of affective self-modelling.

Beauty and Uncertainty as Transformative Factors: A Free Energy Principle Account of Aesthetic Diagnosis and Intervention in Gestalt Psychotherapy

Drawing from field theory, Gestalt therapy conceives psychological suffering and psychotherapy as two intentional field phenomena, where unprocessed and chaotic experiences seek the opportunity to emerge and be assimilated through the contact between the patient and the therapist (i.e., the intentionality of contacting). This therapeutic approach is based on the therapist’s aesthetic experience of his/her embodied presence in the flow of the healing process because (1) the perception of beauty can provide the therapist with feedback on the assimilation of unprocessed experiences; (2) the therapist’s attentional focus on intrinsic aesthetic diagnostic criteria can facilitate the modification of rigid psychopathological fields by supporting the openness to novel experiences. The aim of the present manuscript is to review recent evidence from psychophysiology, neuroaesthetic research, and neurocomputational models of cognition, such as the free energy principle (FEP), which support the notion of the therapeutic potential of aesthetic sensibility in Gestalt psychotherapy. Drawing from neuroimaging data, psychophysiology and recent neurocognitive accounts of aesthetic perception, we propose a novel interpretation of the sense of beauty as a self-generated reward motivating us to assimilate an ever-greater spectrum of sensory and affective states in our predictive representation of ourselves and the world and supporting the intentionality of contact. Expecting beauty, in the psychotherapeutic encounter, can help therapists tolerate uncertainty avoiding impulsive behaviours and to stay tuned to the process of change.

Sense of Agency, Affectivity and Social-Ecological Degradation: An Enactive and Phenomenological Approach

In the last few years, there has been an interest in understanding the impact of environmental change and degradation on people's affective life. This issue has become particularly pressing for populations whose form of life is heavily dependent on ecosystem services and functions and whose opportunities for adaptation are limited. Based on our work with farmers from the Xochimilco urban wetland in the southwest of Mexico City, we begin to draw a theoretical approach to address and explain how environmental degradation impacts people's affective life and sense of agency. Farmers who were part of our project referred to a sense of despair and helplessness toward the loss of the ecosystem and their traditional farming-based form of life. From the perspective of phenomenology, enactivism and ecological psychology, we argue that the loss of this form of life in the area is related to the degradation of socio-ecological systems, limiting the opportunities for people to relate meaningfully to others and the environment. We posit that losing meaningful interaction with the environment generates a feeling of loss of control while leading farmers to feel frustrated, anxious and stressed. Such affective conditions have a direct impact on their sense of agency. In terms of adaptation, the negative interaction between degradation, affective states and a diminished sense of agency can create a downward spiral of vulnerability, including political vulnerability.

Augmenting Human Selves Through Artificial Agents – Lessons From the Brain

Much of current artificial intelligence (AI) and the drive toward artificial general intelligence (AGI) focuses on developing machines for functional tasks that humans accomplish. These may be narrowly specified tasks as in AI, or more general tasks as in AGI – but typically these tasks do not target higher-level human cognitive abilities, such as consciousness or morality; these are left to the realm of so-called “strong AI” or “artificial consciousness.” In this paper, we focus on how a machine can augment humans rather than do what they do, and we extend this beyond AGI-style tasks to augmenting peculiarly personal human capacities, such as wellbeing and morality. We base this proposal on associating such capacities with the “self,” which we define as the “environment-agent nexus”; namely, a fine-tuned interaction of brain with environment in all its relevant variables. We consider richly adaptive architectures that have the potential to implement this interaction by taking lessons from the brain. In particular, we suggest conjoining the free energy principle (FEP) with the dynamic temporo-spatial (TSD) view of neuro-mental processes. Our proposed integration of FEP and TSD – in the implementation of artificial agents – offers a novel, expressive, and explainable way for artificial agents to adapt to different environmental contexts. The targeted applications are broad: from adaptive intelligence augmenting agents (IA’s) that assist psychiatric self-regulation to environmental disaster prediction and personal assistants. This reflects the central role of the mind and moral decision-making in most of what we do as humans.

Grounding Context in Embodied Cognitive Robotics

Biological agents are context-dependent systems that exhibit behavioral flexibility. The internal and external information agents process, their actions, and emotions are all grounded in the context within which they are situated. However, in the field of cognitive robotics, the concept of context is far from being clear with most studies making little to no reference to it. The aim of this paper is to provide an interpretation of the notion of context and its core elements based on different studies in natural agents, and how these core contextual elements have been modeled in cognitive robotics, to introduce a new hypothesis about the interactions between these contextual elements. Here, global context is categorized as agent-related, environmental, and task-related context. The interaction of their core elements, allows agents to first select self-relevant tasks depending on their current needs, or for learning and mastering their environment through exploration. Second, to perform a task and continuously monitor its performance. Third, to abandon a task in case its execution is not going as expected. Here, the monitoring of prediction error, the difference between sensorimotor predictions and incoming sensory information, is at the core of behavioral flexibility during situated action cycles. Additionally, monitoring prediction error dynamics and its comparison with the expected reduction rate should indicate the agent its overall performance on executing the task. Sensitivity to performance evokes emotions that function as the driving element for autonomous behavior which, at the same time, depends on the processing of the interacting core elements. Taking all these into account, an interactionist model of contexts and their core elements is proposed. The model is embodied, affective, and situated, by means of the processing of the agent-related and environmental core contextual elements. Additionally, it is grounded in the processing of the task-related context and the associated situated action cycles during task execution. Finally, the model proposed here aims to guide how artificial agents should process the core contextual elements of the agent-related and environmental context to give rise to the task-related context, allowing agents to autonomously select a task, its planning, execution, and monitoring for behavioral flexibility.

Extended active inference: Constructing predictive cognition beyond skulls

Cognitive niche construction is the process whereby organisms create and maintain cause-effect models of their niche as guides for fitness influencing behavior. Extended mind theory claims that cognitive processes extend beyond the brain to include predictable states of the world. Active inference and predictive processing in cognitive science assume that organisms embody predictive (i.e., generative) models of the world optimized by standard cognitive functions (e.g., perception, action, learning). This paper presents an active inference formulation that views cognitive niche construction as a cognitive function aimed at optimizing organisms' generative models. We call that process of optimization extended active inference.

Social and Cultural Constraints on Football Player Development in Stockholm: Influencing Skill, Learning, and Wellbeing

In this paper, we consider how youth sport and (talent) development environments have adapted to, and are constrained by, social and cultural forces. Empirical evidence from an 18-month ethnographic case study highlights how social and cultural constraints influence the skill development and psychological wellbeing of young football players. We utilized novel ways of knowing (i.e., epistemologies) coupled to ecological frameworks (e.g., the theory of ecological dynamics and the skilled intentionality framework). A transdisciplinary inquiry was used to demonstrate that the values which athletes embody in sports are constrained by the character of the social institutions (sport club, governing body) and the social order (culture) in which they live. The constraining character of an athlete (talent) development environment is captured using ethnographic methods that illuminate a sociocultural value-directedness toward individual competition. The discussion highlights how an emphasis on individual competition overshadows opportunities (e.g., shared, and nested affordances) for collective collaboration in football. Conceptually, we argue that these findings characterize how a dominating sociocultural constraint may negatively influence the skill development, in game performance, and psychological wellbeing (via performance anxiety) of young football players in Stockholm. Viewing cultures and performance environments as embedded complex adaptive systems, with human development as ecological, it becomes clear that microenvironments and embedded relations underpinning athlete development in high performance sports organizations are deeply susceptible to broad cultural trends toward neoliberalism and competitive individualism. Weaving transdisciplinary lines of inquiry, it is clarified how a value directedness toward individual competition may overshadow collective collaboration, not only amplifying socio-cognitive related issues (anxiety, depression, emotional disturbances) but simultaneously limiting perceptual learning, skill development, team coordination and performance at all levels in a sport organization.

Cellular sentience as the primary source of biological order and evolution

All life is cellular, starting some 4 billion years ago with the emergence of the first cells. In order to survive their early evolution in the face of an extremely challenging environment, the very first cells invented cellular sentience and cognition, allowing them to make relevant decisions to survive through creative adaptations in a continuously running evolutionary narrative. We propose that the success of cellular life has crucially depended on a biological version of Maxwell's demons which permits the extraction of relevant sensory information and energy from the cellular environment, allowing cells to sustain anti-entropic actions. These sensor-effector actions allowed for the creative construction of biological order in the form of diverse organic macromolecules, including crucial polymers such as DNA, RNA, and cytoskeleton. Ordered biopolymers store analogue (structures as templates) and digital (nucleotide sequences of DNA and RNA) information that functioned as a form memory to support the development of organisms and their evolution. Crucially, all cells are formed by the division of previous cells, and their plasma membranes are physically and informationally continuous across evolution since the beginning of cellular life. It is argued that life is supported through life-specific principles which support cellular sentience, distinguishing life from non-life. Biological order, together with cellular cognition and sentience, allow the creative evolution of all living organisms as the authentic authors of evolutionary novelty.

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.

Piloting the Update: The Use of Therapeutic Relationship for Change - A Free Energy Account

We apply the Free Energy Principle (FEP) to cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). FEP describes the basic functioning of the brain as a predictive organ and states that any self-organizing system that is in equilibrium with its environment must minimize its free energy. Based on an internal model of the world and the self, predictions-so-called priors-are created, which are matched with the information input. The sum of prediction errors corresponds to the Free Energy, which must be minimized. Internal models can be identified with the cognitive-affective schemas of the individual that has become dysfunctional in patients. The role of CBT in this picture is to help the patient update her/his priors. They have evolved in learning history and no longer provide adaptive predictions. We discuss the process of updating in terms of the exploration-exploitation dilemma. This consists of the extent to which one relies on what one already has, i.e., whether one continues to maintain and "exploit" one's previous priors ("better safe than sorry") or whether one does explore new data that lead to an update of priors. Questioning previous priors triggers stress, which is associated with increases in Free Energy in short term. The role of therapeutic relationship is to buffer this increase in Free Energy, thereby increasing the level of perceived safety. The therapeutic relationship is represented in a dual model of affective alliance and goal attainment alliance and is aligned with FEP. Both forms of alliance support exploration and updating of priors. All aspects are illustrated with the help of a clinical case example.

Synchronous Generative Development amidst Situated Entropy

The Sustainable Development Goals have been criticized for not providing sufficient balance between human well-being and environmental well-being. By contrast, joint agent-environment systems theory is focused on reciprocal synchronous generative development. The purpose of this paper is to extend this theory towards practical application in sustainable development projects. This purpose is fulfilled through three interrelated contributions. First, a practitioner description of the theory is provided. Then, the theory is extended through reference to research concerned with multilevel pragmatics, competing signals, commitment processes, technological mediation, and psychomotor functioning. In addition, the theory is related to human-driven biosocial-technical innovation through the example of digital twins for agroecological urban farming. Digital twins being digital models that mirror physical processes; that are connected to physical processes through, for example, sensors and actuators; and which carry out analyses of physical processes in order to improve their performance. Together, these contributions extend extant theory towards application for synchronous generative development that balances human well-being and environmental well-being. However, the practical examples in the paper indicate that counterproductive complexity can arise from situated entropy amidst biosocial-technical innovations: even when those innovations are compatible with synchronous generative development.

The Predictive Dynamics of Happiness and Well-Being

We offer an account of mental health and well-being using the predictive processing framework (PPF). According to this framework, the difference between mental health and psychopathology can be located in the goodness of the predictive model as a regulator of action. What is crucial for avoiding the rigid patterns of thinking, feeling and acting associated with psychopathology is the regulation of action based on the valence of affective states. In PPF, valence is modelled as error dynamics—the change in prediction errors over time . Our aim in this paper is to show how error dynamics can account for both momentary happiness and longer term well-being. What will emerge is a new neurocomputational framework for making sense of human flourishing.

Understanding Depressive Feelings as Situated Affections

Phenomenologists define social impairments as key aspects of depression and argue that depression is irreducible to the individual. In this article I aim to further elaborate this non-reductionist notion of depression by claiming that depression not only corresponds to an impaired experience of social relations, but also arises from a socially impaired world. To pursue this goal, I will challenge the understanding of depression as an affective disorder blocking the affective communication between individual and environment. I will redefine feelings of depression as situated affections, and hence suggest that (1) they are products of the individual's situatedness in a depressogenic environment and (2) they function in initiating an active withdrawal from such environment.

Deliberate Practice and Motor Learning Principles to Underpin the Design of Training Interventions for Improving Lifting Movement in the Occupational Sector: A Perspective and a Pilot Study on the Role of Augmented Feedback

Spine posture during repetitive lifting is one of the main risk factors for low-back injuries in the occupational sector. It is thus critical to design appropriate intervention strategies for training workers to improve their posture, reducing load on the spine during lifting. The main approach to train safe lifting to workers has been educational; however, systematic reviews and meta-analyses have shown that this approach does not improve lifting movement nor reduces the risk of low back injury. One of the main limitations of this approach lies in the amount, quality and context of practice of the lifting movement. In this article, first we argue for integrating psychologically-grounded perspectives of practice design in the development of training interventions for safe lifting. Principles from deliberate practice and motor learning are combined and integrated. Given the complexity of lifting, a training intervention should occur in the workplace and invite workers to repeatedly practice/perform the lifting movement with the clear goal of improving their lifting-related body posture. Augmented feedback has a central role in creating the suitable condition for achieving such intervention. Second, we focus on spine bending as risk factor and present a pilot study examining the benefits and boundary conditions of different feedback modalities for reducing bending during lifting. The results showed how feedback modalities meet differently key requirements of deliberate practice conditions, i.e., feedback has to be informative, individualized and actionable. Following the proposed approach, psychology will gain an active role in the development of training interventions, contributing to finding solutions for a reduction of risk factors for workers.

Accessing Active Inference Theory through Its Implicit and Deliberative Practice in Human Organizations

Active inference theory (AIT) is a corollary of the free-energy principle, which formalizes cognition of living system’s autopoietic organization. AIT comprises specialist terminology and mathematics used in theoretical neurobiology. Yet, active inference is common practice in human organizations, such as private companies, public institutions, and not-for-profits. Active inference encompasses three interrelated types of actions, which are carried out to minimize uncertainty about how organizations will survive. The three types of action are updating work beliefs, shifting work attention, and/or changing how work is performed. Accordingly, an alternative starting point for grasping active inference, rather than trying to understand AIT specialist terminology and mathematics, is to reflect upon lived experience. In other words, grasping active inference through autoethnographic research. In this short communication paper, accessing AIT through autoethnography is explained in terms of active inference in existing organizational practice (implicit active inference), new organizational methodologies that are informed by AIT (deliberative active inference), and combining implicit and deliberative active inference. In addition, these autoethnographic options for grasping AIT are related to generative learning.

Skilled we-intentionality: Situating joint action in the living environment

There is a difference between the activities of two or more individuals that are performed jointly such as playing music in a band or dancing as a couple, and performing these same activities alone. This difference is sometimes captured by appealing to shared or joint intentions that allow individuals to coordinate what they do over space and time. In what follows we will use the terminology of we-intentionality to refer to what individuals do when they engage in group ways of thinking, feeling and acting. Our aim in this paper is to argue that we-intentionality is best understood in relation to a shared living environment in which acting individuals are situated. By the "living environment" we mean to refer to places and everyday situations in which humans act. These places and situations are simultaneously social, cultural, material and natural. We will use the term "affordance" to refer to the possibilities for action the living environment furnishes. Affordances form and are maintained over time through the activities people repeatedly engage in the living environment. We will show how we-intentionality is best understood in relation to the affordances of the living environmentand by taking into account the skills people have to engage with these affordances. For this reason we coin the term 'skilled we-intentionality' to characterize the intentionality characteristic of group ways of acting, feeling and thinking.

Explaining multistability: postphenomenology and affordances of technologies

A central issue in postphenomenology is how to explain the multistability of technologies: how can it be that specific technologies can be used for a wide variety of purposes (the “multi”), while not for all purposes (the “stability”)? For example, a table can be used for the purpose of sleeping, having dinner at, or even for staging a fencing match, but not for baking a cake. One explanation offered in the literature is that the (material) design of a technology puts constraints on the purposes for which technologies can be used. In this paper, I argue that such an explanation—while partly correct—fails to address the role of the environment in which human beings operate in putting constraints on technology use. I suggest that James Gibson’s affordance theory helps highlighting how stabilities in technology use arise in the interaction between human being and environment. Building on more recent approaches in affordance theory, I suggest that the environment can be conceptualized as a “rich landscape of affordances” that solicits certain actions, which are not just cued by the environment’s material structure, but also by the normativity present in the form of life in which a human being participates. I briefly contrast the approach to affordances developed in this paper with how Klenk (2020) and Tollon (2021) have conceptualized the “affordance character” of technological artifacts, and highlight how a focus on the situated nature of affordances augments these earlier conceptualizations.

Consciousness in active inference: Deep self-models, other minds, and the challenge of psychedelic-induced ego-dissolution

Predictive processing approaches to brain function are increasingly delivering promise for illuminating the computational underpinnings of a wide range of phenomenological states. It remains unclear, however, whether predictive processing is equipped to accommodate a theory of consciousness itself. Furthermore, objectors have argued that without specification of the core computational mechanisms of consciousness, predictive processing is unable to inform the attribution of consciousness to other non-human (biological and artificial) systems. In this paper, I argue that an account of consciousness in the predictive brain is within reach via recent accounts of phenomenal self-modelling in the active inference framework. The central claim here is that phenomenal consciousness is underpinned by 'subjective valuation'-a deep inference about the precision or 'predictability' of the self-evidencing ('fitness-promoting') outcomes of action. Based on this account, I argue that this approach can critically inform the distribution of experience in other systems, paying particular attention to the complex sensory attenuation mechanisms associated with deep self-models. I then consider an objection to the account: several recent papers argue that theories of consciousness that invoke self-consciousness as constitutive or necessary for consciousness are undermined by states (or traits) of 'selflessness'; in particular the 'totally selfless' states of ego-dissolution occasioned by psychedelic drugs. Drawing on existing work that accounts for psychedelic-induced ego-dissolution in the active inference framework, I argue that these states do not threaten to undermine an active inference theory of consciousness. Instead, these accounts corroborate the view that subjective valuation is the constitutive facet of experience, and they highlight the potential of psychedelic research to inform consciousness science, computational psychiatry and computational phenomenology.

The brain and its time: intrinsic neural timescales are key for input processing

We process and integrate multiple timescales into one meaningful whole. Recent evidence suggests that the brain displays a complex multiscale temporal organization. Different regions exhibit different timescales as described by the concept of intrinsic neural timescales (INT); however, their function and neural mechanisms remains unclear. We review recent literature on INT and propose that they are key for input processing. Specifically, they are shared across different species, i.e., input sharing. This suggests a role of INT in encoding inputs through matching the inputs' stochastics with the ongoing temporal statistics of the brain's neural activity, i.e., input encoding. Following simulation and empirical data, we point out input integration versus segregation and input sampling as key temporal mechanisms of input processing. This deeply grounds the brain within its environmental and evolutionary context. It carries major implications in understanding mental features and psychiatric disorders, as well as going beyond the brain in integrating timescales into artificial intelligence.

Metastable attunement and real-life skilled behavior

In everyday situations, and particularly in some sport and working contexts, humans face an inherently unpredictable and uncertain environment. All sorts of unpredictable and unexpected things happen but typically people are able to skillfully adapt. In this paper, we address two key questions in cognitive science. First, how is an agent able to bring its previously learned skill to bear on a novel situation? Second, how can an agent be both sensitive to the particularity of a given situation, while remaining flexibly poised for many other possibilities for action? We will argue that both the sensitivity to novel situations and the sensitivity to a multiplicity of action possibilities are enabled by the property of skilled agency that we will call metastable attunement. We characterize a skilled agent's flexible interactions with a dynamically changing environment in terms of metastable dynamics in agent-environment systems. What we find in metastability is the realization of two competing tendencies: the tendency of the agent to express their intrinsic dynamics and the tendency to search for new possibilities. Metastably attuned agents are ready to engage with a multiplicity of affordances, allowing for a balance between stability and flexibility. On the one hand, agents are able to exploit affordances they are attuned to, while at the same time being ready to flexibly explore for other affordances. Metastable attunement allows agents to smoothly transition between these possible configurations so as to adapt their behaviour to what the particular situation requires. We go on to describe the role metastability plays in learning of new skills, and in skilful behaviour more generally. Finally, drawing upon work in art, architecture and sports science, we develop a number of perspectives on how to investigate metastable attunement in real life situations.

Active Inference and Cooperative Communication: An Ecological Alternative to the Alignment View

We present and contrast two accounts of cooperative communication, both based on Active Inference, a framework that unifies biological and cognitive processes. The mental alignment account, defended in Vasil et al., takes the function of cooperative communication to be the alignment of the interlocutor's mental states, and cooperative communicative behavior to be driven by an evolutionarily selected adaptive prior belief favoring the selection of action policies that promote such an alignment. We argue that the mental alignment account should be rejected because it neglects the action-oriented nature of cooperative communication, which skews its view of the dynamics of communicative interaction. We introduce our own conception of cooperative communication, inspired by a more radical ecological interpretation of the active inference framework. Cooperative communication, on our ecological conception, serves to guide and constrain the dynamics of the cooperative interaction via the construction and restructuring of shared fields of affordances, in order to reach the local goals of the joint actions in which episodes of cooperative communication are embedded. We argue that our ecological conception provides a better theoretical standpoint to account for the action-oriented nature of cooperative communication in the active inference framework.

Seven computations of the social brain

The social environment presents the human brain with the most complex information processing demands. The computations that the brain must perform occur in parallel, combine social and nonsocial cues, produce verbal and nonverbal signals and involve multiple cognitive systems, including memory, attention, emotion and learning. This occurs dynamically and at timescales ranging from milliseconds to years. Here, we propose that during social interactions, seven core operations interact to underwrite coherent social functioning; these operations accumulate evidence efficiently-from multiple modalities-when inferring what to do next. We deconstruct the social brain and outline the key components entailed for successful human-social interaction. These include (i) social perception; (ii) social inferences, such as mentalizing; (iii) social learning; (iv) social signaling through verbal and nonverbal cues; (v) social drives (e.g. how to increase one's status); (vi) determining the social identity of agents, including oneself and (vii) minimizing uncertainty within the current social context by integrating sensory signals and inferences. We argue that while it is important to examine these distinct aspects of social inference, to understand the true nature of the human social brain, we must also explain how the brain integrates information from the social world.