title: Action-Oriented Predictive Processing and Social Cognition
title: Action-Oriented Predictive Processing and Social Cognition
Creators: name: Quadt, Lisa A.
Publisher: name: Theoretical Philosophy/MIND Group – JGU Mainz
Year: 2017

description: The research field on social cognition currently finds itself confronted with two conflicting theoretical camps, cognitivism and enactivism. In their most extreme formulations, the former claims that mindreading skills exhaust our social cognitive capacities, while the latter stresses the sufficiency of interaction and embodiment. My aim is to find a middle position that provides the basis for discussing social cognition as interactive and embodied, while remaining in non-radical territory.
This can be achieved by situating social cognition within the framework of action-oriented predictive processing (Clark 2013). Specifically, I propose three conceptual tools, namely (1) embodied social inference (EmSI), (2) action-oriented predictions (a-o predictions) (Clark 2016), and (3) interactive inference (InI).
The first concept of EmSI refers to the more general term of “embodied inference” (Friston 2012), which means that organism’s morphology incorporates the demands of its environment. This idea can be applied to the social realm, in the sense that the kind of body an individual has constrains the kind of social interaction they can engage in. While humans, for example, can exploit their speech apparatus for communication, ants instead rely on their pheromone system. The body of an individual thus also constrains social cognitive skills and can be said to play a crucial role for interactions. This becomes obvious when considering the second concept of “action-oriented predictions”. The basic idea is that the job of a predictive model is to distribute the cognitive workload and recruit embodied action whenever possible. Here too the body plays an indispensable role in that it realizes prediction error minimization by engaging with the external world via active inference. Related to this idea is the last concept of ”interactive inference”. I claim that interaction plays the same role for social cognition as action does for general cognition – namely gathering information about the social environment and thus actively sculpting not only one’s external, but also internal environment. InI can be described as the minimization of prediction error while navigating the social environment. It serves to actively sample proof for predictions or to disambiguate competing models about the other. 
In what I call replicative interactive inference (RInI), the bodily state (e.g., posture, movements) of another person is mimicked in order to supplement exteroceptive information about them with interoceptive and proprioceptive information. Mimicry, synchronization and automatic imitation are instances of RInI that function to make predictions about the other more precise by increasing the number of signal sources that yield relevant information. 
Secondly, complementary interactive inference (CInI) refers to changing one’s internal or external environment in response to the other person. It serves to either regulate the other’s current state (e.g., mothers lowering their body temperature to cool down their infant’s feverish body; Nyqvist et al. 2010), or to evoke further behavioral response that then serves as additional exteroceptive input (e.g., using gestures to express one’s uncertainty).
These conceptual tools can serve to alleviate the tension between enactivist and cognitivist theories. The present proposal thereby enables a dialogue about social cognition as an interactive and embodied process.
description: Philosophy and Predictive Processing
description: Philosophy and Predictive Processing