Karl J. Friston

Thomas Parr

Giovanni Pezzulo

The first comprehensive treatment of active inference, an integrative perspective on brain, cognition, and behavior used across multiple disciplines. Active inference is a way of understanding sentient behavior—a theory that characterizes perception, planning, and action in terms of probabilistic inference. Developed by theoretical neuroscientist Karl Friston over years of groundbreaking research, active inference provides an integrated perspective on brain, cognition, and behavior that is increasingly used across multiple disciplines including neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. Active inference puts the action into perception. This book offers the first comprehensive treatment of active inference, covering theory, applications, and cognitive domains. Active inference is a “first principles” approach to understanding behavior and the brain, framed in terms of a single imperative to minimize free energy. The book emphasizes the implications of the free energy principle for understanding how the brain works. It first introduces active inference both conceptually and formally, contextualizing it within current theories of cognition. It then provides specific examples of computational models that use active inference to explain such cognitive phenomena as perception, attention, memory, and planning.

The Free Energy Principle in Mind, Brain, and Behavior

Active Inference

Martin V. Butz

Rino Falcone

Cristiano Castelfranchi

The general idea that brains anticipate the future, that they engage in prediction, and that one means of doing this is through some sort of inner model that can be run of?ine,hasalonghistory. SomeversionoftheideawascommontoAristotle,aswell as to many medieval scholastics, to Leibniz and Hume, and in more recent times, to Kenneth Craik and Philip Johnson-Laird. One reason that this general idea recurs continually is that this is the kind of picture that introspection paints. When we are engaged in tasks it seems that we form images that are predictions, or anticipations, and that these images are isomorphic to what they represent. But as much as the general idea recurs, opposition to it also recurs. The idea has never been widely accepted, or uncontroversial among psychologists, cognitive scientists and neuroscientists. The main reason has been that science cannot be s- is?ed with metaphors and introspection. In order to gain acceptance, an idea needs to be formulated clearly enough so that it can be used to construct testable hypot- ses whose results will clearly supportor cast doubtupon the hypothesis. Next, those ideasthatare formulablein one oranothersortof symbolismor notationare capable of being modeled, and modeling is a huge part of cognitive neuroscience. If an idea cannot be clearly modeled, then there are limits to how widely it can be tested and accepted by a cognitive neuroscience community.

A Unifying Framework for the Analysis and Design of Artificial Cognitive Systems

The Challenge of Anticipation

Gianluca Baldassarre

Olivier Sigaud

This book presents the refereed post-proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Anticipatory Behavior in Adaptive Learning Systems. Twenty full papers were chosen from among the many submissions. Papers are organized into sections covering anticipatory aspects in brains, language, and cognition; individual anticipatory frameworks; learning predictions and anticipations; anticipatory individual behavior; and anticipatory social behavior.

From Brains to Individual and Social Behavior

Anticipatory Behavior in Adaptive Learning Systems

Giovanni Pezzulo

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