Contextualizing predictive minds.

The structure of human memory seems to be optimized for efficient prediction, planning, and behavior. We propose that these capacities rely on a tripartite structure of memory that includes concepts, events, and contexts-three layers that constitute the mental world model. We suggest that the mechanism that critically increases adaptivity and flexibility is the tendency to contextualize.

Infants infer and predict coherent event interactions: Modeling cognitive development.

Mental representations of the environment in infants are sparse and grow richer during their development. Anticipatory eye fixation studies show that infants aged around 7 months start to predict the goal of an observed action, e.g.

Inference of affordances and active motor control in simulated agents.

Flexible, goal-directed behavior is a fundamental aspect of human life. Based on the free energy minimization principle, the theory of active inference formalizes the generation of such behavior from a computational neuroscience perspective. Based on the theory, we introduce an output-probabilistic, temporally predictive, modular artificial neural network architecture, which processes sensorimotor information, infers behavior-relevant aspects of its world, and invokes highly flexible, goal-directed behavior.

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

During the observation of goal-directed actions, infants usually predict the goal at an earlier age when the agent is familiar (e.g., human hand) compared to unfamiliar (e.

Emergent Goal-Anticipatory Gaze in Infants via Event-Predictive Learning and Inference.

From about 7 months of age onward, infants start to reliably fixate the goal of an observed action, such as a grasp, before the action is complete. The available research has identified a variety of factors that influence such goal-anticipatory gaze shifts, including the experience with the shown action events and familiarity with the observed agents. However, the underlying cognitive processes are still heavily debated.