Brains, it has recently been argued, are essentially prediction machines. They are bundles of cells that support perception and action by constantly attempting to match incoming sensory inputs with top-down expectations or predictions. This is achieved using a hierarchical generative model that aims to minimize prediction error within a bidirectional cascade of cortical processing. Such accounts offer a unifying model of perception and action, illuminate the functional role of attention, and may neatly capture the special contribution of cortical processing to adaptive success. This target article critically examines this "hierarchical prediction machine" approach, concluding that it offers the best clue yet to the shape of a unified science of mind and action. Sections 1 and 2 lay out the key elements and implications of the approach. Section 3 explores a variety of pitfalls and challenges, spanning the evidential, the methodological, and the more properly conceptual. The paper ends (sections 4 and 5) by asking how such approaches might impact our more general vision of mind, experience, and agency.

/pdf/whatever-next-predictive-brains-situated-agents-and-the-epj56cs868.pdf

Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA157550.pdf

The TRACE model of speech perception.

https://blogs.umass.edu/jkingstn/files/2013/12/liberman_mattingly_1985_cognition.pdf

The motor theory of speech perception revised

The development of reading depends on phonological awareness across all languages so far studied. Languages vary in the consistency with which phonology is represented in orthography. This results in developmental differences in the grain size of lexical representations and accompanying differences in developmental reading strategies and the manifestation of dyslexia across orthographies. Differences in lexical representations and reading across languages leave developmental “footprints” in the adult lexicon. The lexical organization and processing strategies that are characteristic of skilled reading in different orthographies are affected by different developmental constraints in different writing systems. The authors develop a novel theoretical framework to explain these cross-language data, which they label a psycholinguistic grain size theory of reading and its development.

Reading acquisition, developmental dyslexia, and skilled reading across languages: a psycholinguistic grain size theory.

We propose that aesthetic pleasure is a function of the perceiver’s processing dynamics: The more fluently perceivers can process an object, the more positive their aesthetic response. We review variables known to influence aesthetic judgments, such as figural goodness, figure–ground contrast, stimulus repetition, symmetry, and prototypicality, and trace their effects to changes in processing fluency. Other variables that influence processing fluency, like visual or semantic priming, similarly increase judgments of aesthetic pleasure. Our proposal provides an integrative framework for the study of aesthetic pleasure and sheds light on the interplay between early preferences versus cultural influences on taste, preferences for both prototypical and abstracted forms, and the relation between beauty and truth. In contrast to theories that trace aesthetic pleasure to objective stimulus features per se, we propose that beauty is grounded in the processing experiences of the perceiver, which are in part a function of stimulus properties.

/pdf/processing-fluency-and-aesthetic-pleasure-is-beauty-in-the-16nzkkz4gn.pdf

Processing Fluency and Aesthetic Pleasure: Is Beauty in the Perceiver's Processing Experience?

Three experiments were designed to investigate two explanations for the integration effect in memory for songs (Serafine, Crowder, & Repp, 1984; Serafine, Davidson, Crowder, & Repp, 1986). The integration effect is the finding that recognition of the melody (or text) of a song is better in the presence of the text (or melody) with which it had been heard originally than in the presence of a different text (or melody). One explanation for this finding is the physical interaction hypothesis, which holds that one component of a song exerts subtle but memorable physical changes on the other component, making the latter different from what it would be with a different companion. In Experiments 1 and 2, we investigated the influence that words could exert on the subtle musical character of a melody. A second explanation for the integration effect is the association by-contiguity hypothesis, which holds that any two events experienced in close temporal proximity may become connected in memory such that each acts as a recall cue for the other. In Experiment 3, we investigated the degree to which simultaneous presentation of spoken text with a hummed melody would induce an association between the two components. The results gave encouragement for both explanations and are discussed in terms of the distinction between encoding specificity and independent associative bonding.

http://www.haskins.yale.edu/sr/SR099/sr099_08.pdf

Physical interaction and association by contiguity in memory for the words and melodies of songs

According to common-coding theory (Hommel, Miisseler, Aschersleben, & Prinz, 2001), actions are coded in terms of their perceptual effects. The related theory of internal models (e.g., Wolpert & Kawato, 1998) assumes that forward models automatically generate predictions of the sensory consequences of actions and compare them with the actual sensory input. Both theories predict not only effects of perception on action, but also effects of action on perception. Influences of action on visual perception have indeed been found (Hamilton, Wolpert, & Frith, 2004; Miall et al., 2006; Schubo, Aschersleben, & Prinz, 2001; Wiihr & Miisseler, 2001). For example, Wohlschlager (2000) required participants to turn a knob or to press keys in a left-to-right (L-R) or right-to-left (R-L) order while observing perceptually bistable rotating visual displays. The direction of the manual action significantly biased the perceived direction of rotation: It made participants see the display differently. Can action also influence auditory perception? We used tone pairs (derived from research on the tritone paradox; see Deutsch, Kuyper, & Fisher, 1987) that were perceptually bistable with regard to the direction of the pitch change between the two tones. Skilled pianists were required to play these tone pairs by depressing keys on a keyboard and to judge whether the pitch went up or down. We predicted that they would hear the pitch more often as rising with an L-R key-press order than with an R-L key-press order.

Action Can Affect Auditory Perception

Seven experiments show that an event onset shift (EOS) in an auditory sequence causes an involuntary phase correction response (PCR) in synchronized finger tapping. This PCR is (a) equally large in inphase and antiphase tapping; (b) reduced but still present when the EOS occurs in either of two interleaved (target-distractor) sequences; (c) unaffected by increased pitch separation between these sequences; (d) asymptotic in magnitude as EOS magnitude increases, unlike the intentional PCR to expected phase shifts; and (e) enhanced when the EOS precedes the onset of tapping, because of phase resetting. Thus, phase correction is revealed to be partially automatic and partially under voluntary control, and to be based mainly on temporal information derived from simple onset detection.

Automaticity and voluntary control of phase correction following event onset shifts in sensorimotor synchronization.

Integration of segmental and tonal information in speech perception: a cross-linguistic study

This paper presents an analysis of the asynchronies among nominally simultaneous notes in ten graduate student pianists’ performances of three compositions (Schumann’s ‘‘Traumerei,’’ Debussy’s ‘‘La fille aux cheveux de lin,’’ and Chopin’s Prelude in D‐flat major), each repeated twice and recorded in MIDI format on a Yamaha Disklavier. Note onset times were sensed from hammer motion shortly before hammer‐string contact. A pervasive tendency was found for the highest‐pitched notes (usually the principal melody) to lead lower‐pitched notes, especially those played with the same hand. Inner notes of within‐hand chords tended to lag behind outer notes. Strong correlations between average MIDI velocity difference and average lead time were found within each hand, as well as between hands for some of the pianists. Other pianists had a tendency to lead with the left hand, independent of MIDI velocity. These individual differences in between‐hand coordination were stable across the three compositions and did not reflect handedness. The results suggest that within‐hand asynchronies and melody leads are largely a consequence of dynamic differentiation of voices (i.e., an artifact of hammer travel time), whereas left‐hand leads are an individual characteristic and, in part, a deliberate expressive strategy exhibited by some pianists.

Bruno H. Repp

Papers

Physical interaction and association by contiguity in memory for the words and melodies of songs

Action Can Affect Auditory Perception

Automaticity and voluntary control of phase correction following event onset shifts in sensorimotor synchronization.

Integration of segmental and tonal information in speech perception: a cross-linguistic study

Patterns of note onset asynchronies in expressive piano performance.