Hostname: page-component-77f85d65b8-lfk5g Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-04-18T11:50:21.475Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Causal surgery under a Markov blanket

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2022

Daniel Yon Open the ORCID record for Daniel Yon [Opens in a new window]  and
Philip Robert Corlett Open the ORCID record for Philip Robert Corlett [Opens in a new window]
Daniel Yon
Affiliation:
Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, London WC1E 7HX, UK d.yon@bbk.ac.uk www.danielyon.com
Philip Robert Corlett
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, Connecticut Mental Health Center, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06519, USA philip.corlett@yale.edu https://medicine.yale.edu/lab/corlett/
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Bruineberg et al. provide compelling clarity on the roles Markov blankets could (and perhaps should) play in the study of life and mind. However, here we draw attention to a further role blankets might play: as a hypothesis about cognition itself. People and other animals may use blanket-like representations to model the boundary between themselves and their worlds.

Information

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 45 , 2022 , e218
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Bortolotti, L., & Broome, M. R. (2012). Affective dimensions of the phenomenon of double bookkeeping in delusions. Emotion Review, 4(2), 187–191. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073911430115CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Corlett, P. R., Honey, G. D., & Fletcher, P. C. (2016). Prediction error, ketamine and psychosis: An updated model. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 30(11), 1145–1155. https://doi.org/10.1177/0269881116650087CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dickinson, A., & Balleine, B. (1994). Motivational control of goal-directed action. Animal Learning & Behavior, 22(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03199951CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Findling, C., Skvortsova, V., Dromnelle, R., Palminteri, S., & Wyart, V. (2019). Computational noise in reward-guided learning drives behavioral variability in volatile environments. Nature Neuroscience, 22(12), 2066–2077. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-019-0518-9CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Frith, C. D., Blakemore, S. J., & Wolpert, D. M. (2000). Abnormalities in the awareness and control of action. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 355(1404), 1771–1788. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2000.0734CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kepecs, A., Uchida, N., Zariwala, H. A., & Mainen, Z. F. (2008). Neural correlates, computation and behavioural impact of decision confidence. Nature, 455(7210), 227–231. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature07200CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kulakova, E., Khalighinejad, N., & Haggard, P. (2017). I could have done otherwise: Availability of counterfactual comparisons informs the sense of agency. Consciousness and Cognition, 49, 237–244. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2017.01.013CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Papineau, D., & Heyes, C. (2006). Rational or associative? Imitation in Japanese quail. In Nudds, M. & Hurley, S. (Eds.), Rational animals (pp. 187–195). Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pearl, J., Glymour, M., & Jewell, N. P. (2016). Causal inference in statistics: A primer. Wiley.Google Scholar
Penn, D. C., & Povinelli, D. J. (2007). Causal cognition in human and nonhuman animals: A comparative, critical review. Annual Review of Psychology, 58, 97–118. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.58.110405.085555CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Redgrave, P., & Gurney, K. (2006). The short-latency dopamine signal: A role in discovering novel actions? Nature Reviews. Neuroscience, 7(12), 967–975. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2022CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schmack, K., Bosc, M., Ott, T., Sturgill, J. F., & Kepecs, A. (2021). Striatal dopamine mediates hallucination-like perception in mice. Science (New York, N.Y.), 372(6537), eabf4740. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abf4740CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sharpe, M. J., Chang, C. Y., Liu, M. A., Batchelor, H. M., Mueller, L. E., Jones, J. L., … Schoenbaum, G. (2017). Dopamine transients are sufficient and necessary for acquisition of model-based associations. Nature Neuroscience, 20(5), 735–742. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.4538CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wen, W., Shibata, H., Ohata, R., Yamashita, A., Asama, H., & Imamizu, H. (2020). The active sensing of control difference. iScience, 23(5), 101112. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2020.101112CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Yon, D., Bunce, C., & Press, C. (2020). Illusions of control without delusions of grandeur. Cognition, 205, 104429. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104429CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Yon, D., & Frith, C. D. (2021). Precision and the Bayesian brain. Current Biology, 31(17), R1026–R1032. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2021.07.044CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed