An active inference model of hierarchical action understanding, learning and imitation

Active inference as a theory of sentient behavior

This review paper offers an overview of the history and future of active inference-a unifying perspective on action and perception. Active inference is based upon the idea that sentient behavior depends upon our brains' implicit use of internal models to predict, infer, and direct action. Our focus is upon the conceptual roots and development of this theory of (basic) sentience and does not follow a rigid chronological narrative. We trace the evolution from Helmholtzian ideas on unconscious inference, through to a contemporary understanding of action and perception. In doing so, we touch upon related perspectives, the neural underpinnings of active inference, and the opportunities for future development. Key steps in this development include the formulation of predictive coding models and related theories of neuronal message passing, the use of sequential models for planning and policy optimization, and the importance of hierarchical (temporally) deep internal (i.e., generative or world) models. Active inference has been used to account for aspects of anatomy and neurophysiology, to offer theories of psychopathology in terms of aberrant precision control, and to unify extant psychological theories. We anticipate further development in all these areas and note the exciting early work applying active inference beyond neuroscience. This suggests a future not just in biology, but in robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

'Snakes and ladders' in paleoanthropology: From cognitive surprise to skillfulness a million years ago

A paradigmatic account may suffice to explain behavioral evolution in early Homo. We propose a parsimonious account that (1) could explain a particular, frequently-encountered, archeological outcome of behavior in early Homo - namely, the fashioning of a Paleolithic stone 'handaxe' - from a biological theoretic perspective informed by the free energy principle (FEP); and that (2) regards instances of the outcome as postdictive or retrodictive, circumstantial corroboration. Our proposal considers humankind evolving as a self-organizing biological ecosystem at a geological time-scale. We offer a narrative treatment of this self-organization in terms of the FEP. Specifically, we indicate how 'cognitive surprises' could underwrite an evolving propensity in early Homo to express sporadic unorthodox or anomalous behavior. This co-evolutionary propensity has left us a legacy of Paleolithic artifacts that is reminiscent of a 'snakes and ladders' board game of appearances, disappearances, and reappearances of particular archeological traces of Paleolithic behavior. When detected in the Early and Middle Pleistocene record, anthropologists and archeologists often imagine evidence of unusual or novel behavior in terms of early humankind ascending the rungs of a figurative phylogenetic 'ladder' - as if these corresponded to progressive evolution of cognitive abilities that enabled incremental achievements of increasingly innovative technical prowess, culminating in the cognitive ascendancy of Homo sapiens. The conjecture overlooks a plausible likelihood that behavior by an individual who was atypical among her conspecifics could have been disregarded in a community of Hominina (for definition see Appendix 1) that failed to recognize, imagine, or articulate potential advantages of adopting hitherto unorthodox behavior. Such failure, as well as diverse fortuitous demographic accidents, would cause exceptional personal behavior to be ignored and hence unremembered. It could disappear by a pitfall, down a 'snake', as it were, in the figurative evolutionary board game; thereby causing a discontinuity in the evolution of human behavior that presents like an evolutionary puzzle. The puzzle discomforts some paleoanthropologists trained in the natural and life sciences. They often dismiss it, explaining it away with such self-justifying conjectures as that, maybe, separate paleospecies of Homo differentially possessed different cognitive abilities, which, supposedly, could account for the presence or absence in the Pleistocene archeological record of traces of this or that behavioral outcome or skill. We argue that an alternative perspective - that inherits from the FEP and an individual's 'active inference' about its surroundings and of its own responses - affords a prosaic, deflationary, and parsimonious way to account for appearances, disappearances, and reappearances of particular behavioral outcomes and skills of early humankind.