Event‐Predictive Cognition: A Root for Conceptual Human Thought

Abstract

Our minds navigate a continuous stream of sensorimotor experiences, selectively compressing them into events. Event‐predictive encodings and processing abilities have evolved because they mirror interactions between agents and objects—and the pursuance or avoidance of critical interactions lies at the heart of survival and reproduction. However, it appears that these abilities have evolved not only to pursue live‐enhancing events and to avoid threatening events, but also to distinguish food sources, to produce and to use tools, to cooperate, and to communicate. They may have even set the stage for the formation of larger societies and the development of cultural identities. Research on event‐predictive cognition investigates how events and conceptualizations thereof are learned, structured, and processed dynamically. It suggests that event‐predictive encodings and processes optimally mediate between sensorimotor processes and language. On the one hand, they enable us to perceive and control physical interactions with our world in a highly adaptive, versatile, goal‐directed manner. On the other hand, they allow us to coordinate complex social interactions and, in particular, to comprehend and produce language. Event‐predictive learning segments sensorimotor experiences into event‐predictive encodings. Once first encodings are formed, the mind learns progressively higher order compositional structures, which allow reflecting on the past, reasoning, and planning on multiple levels of abstraction. We conclude that human conceptual thought may be grounded in the principles of event‐predictive cognition constituting its root.

The Impact of Action Effects on Infants’ Predictive Gaze Shifts for a Non-Human Grasping Action at 7, 11, and 18 Months

“…Based on the free energy minimization formalism ( Friston, 2010 ; Friston et al, 2015 ), during action generation and observation, CAPRI actively infers gaze behavior via the objective to minimize uncertainty about the probabilistically inferred ongoing and upcoming interactions. Critically, the involved learned, generative, and event-predictive models ( Zacks et al, 2007 ; Butz, 2016 ; Butz et al, 2021 ) segment the continuous sensorimotor experiences into event and event-transition encodings, thus enabling deeper considerations about the upcoming events. As a result, predictive gaze behavior developed when CAPRI was trained on object interaction events – in this case not considering differences between observing or executing actions.…”

Towards Strong AI

“…Temporal instabilities mark transitions between attractors and are harder to predict (cf. the early model of Jeff Zacks [117] and related propositions elsewhere [4,14,16,58,100]). Measures of surprise have been proposed and implemented to quickly identify transitions between events, segmenting the stream of information and consolidating event codes [20,45,117].…”

“…When considering brain development and cognition, it has become obvious that evolution has equipped us with numerous such inductive biases to maximize our chances of survival on an evolutionary scale [24]. Simply put, it appears that evolution has discovered that CGPMs enable the pursuance of more social, adaptive, versatile, and anticipatory goal-directed behavior [16]. From a more cognitive perspective it may be said that CGPMs enable us to reason and ask questions in an interventional, prospective as well as in a counterfactual, memorizing, and consolidating, retrospective manner [79,80].…”

“…Various strands of research in cognitive science emphasize that we perceive and act upon our world in the form of events [4,14,16,58]. Given our CGPM perspective, event-predictive cognition emphasizes that events are flexibly constructed in a compositional manner.…”

“…While event transitions may be more fluid in many other circumstances, it appears that our brain has a strong tendency, that is, an inductive learning bias, to segment and compress the continuous stream of sensorimotor experiences into event-predictive encodings [16]. Such event encodings have been characterized as common codes of actions and their effects (Theory of Event Coding, [50]).…”