Counterfactual cognition and psychosis: adding complexity to predictive processing accounts

Abstract

Counterfactual cognition and psychosis: Adding complexity to predictive processing accountsOver the last decade or so, several researchers have considered the predictive processing framework (PPF) to be a useful perspective from which to shed some much-needed light on the mechanisms behind psychosis. Most approaches to psychosis within PPF come down to the idea of the "atypical" brain generating inaccurate hypotheses that the "typical" brain does not generate, either due to a systematic top-down processing bias or more general precision weighting breakdown. Strong at explaining common individual symptoms of psychosis, such approaches face some issues when we look at a more general clinical picture. In this paper, we propose an update on the current accounts of psychosis based on the realization that a neurotypical brain constantly generates non-actual, de-coupled, counterfactual hypotheses as part of healthy cognition. We suggest that what is going on in psychosis, at least in some cases, is not so much a generation of erroneous hypotheses, but rather an inability to correctly use the counterfactual ones. This updated view casts "accurate" cognition as more fragile and delicate, but also closes the gap between psychosis and typical cognition.

The role of episodic memory in causal reasoning with counterfactuals: A perspective from predictive processing and trace minimalism

“…It has further demonstrated almost unprecedented potential for bringing human cognition under a single set of processing principles, offering a single explanatory basis for various cognitive capacities as well as cognitive and social sciences, arts, and humanities (see, e.g., Clark, 2013;Friston, 2010;Seth, 2015). Predictiveprocessing-based explanations already span many domains, including but not limited to language (Rappe 2019(Rappe , 2022, emotion (Miller & Clark, 2018;Seth, 2013), planning (Kaplan & Friston, 2018), various psychopathologies (Adams et al, 2013;Fletcher & Frith, 2009;Pellicano & Burr, 2012;Rappe & Wilkinson, 2023;Van de Cruys et al, 2014), and even consciousness (Clark, Friston & Wilkinson, 2019;Deane, 2021;Dołęga & Dewhurst, 2021). 4 Hence, in relying on the predictive processing framework in explaining the mechanisms of causal reasoning through counterfactuals, we situate our proposal in a much broader body of cognitive science and philosophical literature.…”

“…The research community has increasingly acknowledged that generating alternative broadly causal explanations (hypothesis, predictions, probabilistic links) to the past, current, or future states of events plays a part in a wide range of cognitive tasks. Such rich spaces of causal alternatives are not just emphasized in the traditional domains such as planning and goal-oriented behavior (Byrne, 2016) but also for learning priors in the absence of direct feedback (Zylberberg et al, 2018), imagination (Jones & Wilkinson, 2020;Burr & Jones, 2016;Friston et al, 2012;Seth, 2014), and even sensory perception and its phenomenology (Seth, 2014;Wilkinson, 2020;Rappe & Wilkinson, 2023). However, the mechanisms behind generating alternative scenarios in such frameworks are underexplored, and not all alternative scenarios are created equal (Rappe & Wilkinson, 2023, for more detail).…”

“…This may be a good starting point. However, further exploration of such alternative hypotheses and their causal consequences still requires proper simulation to propel the exploration forward (Rappe & Wilkinson, 2023). Here, simulation refers to the redistribution of precision weighting in a way that allows the system to treat the "hypothetical" parts of the model as if these hypotheses were indeed selected as the winning ones to generate rich spaces of alternatives.…”

“…Further, even though a subjective categorical marker of perceptual reality can (and evolutionarily should) be reasonably robust early in development as well as independent of metacognitive abilities, as metacognitive processes and multisensory congruence develop in the first few years of life, the sense of perceptual reality should become richer but also more subjectively confusing (see Goupil and Kouider, 2019). Because the subjective sense of reality and categorical reality monitoring are not independent (see Rappe and Wilkinson, 2023), this developmental process can affect reality monitoring and one's perceptual experience.…”