Scientific Reports
April 3, 2025
Joel Patchitt, Sarah N. Garfinkel, William H Strawson et al.
4 citations
False physiological feedback—mismatches between perceived and actual bodily signals—can bias how people judge the emotional intensity of faces. Prior work using auditory feedback suggested that perceived changes in heart rate increase intensity ratings regardless of whether the feedback indicates a faster or slower heart rate, with the right anterior insula acting as a mismatch detector. This study used pulsatile somatosensory stimulation (vibration) at rates above, below, or matching participants' heart rate, or no stimulation, while they rated emotional faces during brain scanning. Feedback produced a bidirectional effect: intensity ratings increased over each 20-second stimulation block.
Front Neurorobot
November 14, 2023
Adam Safron, Inês Hipólito, Andy Clark
2 citations
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Synthese
January 1, 2025
Ben White, Andy Clark, Avel Guènin-Carlut et al.
The classical extended mind thesis, with its conditions of trust and glue and phenomenal transparency, poorly describes how people engage with ambient smart environments—spaces infused with background smart technology that operates without explicit user interaction. Drawing on active inference, a theory that frames cognition as embodied uncertainty minimization, the authors develop a process-based version of the extended mind in which mental boundaries are multiple and shifting. They argue that ambient smart environments function as extended allostatic control systems, invisibly supporting an agent's biological capacity to minimize uncertainty across interlocking timescales. This account reframes the classical extended mind thesis to better capture the fluid, background operation of such environments.
Mind & Language
June 1, 2022
Axel Constant, Andy Clark, Michael D Kirchhoff et al.
Cognitive niche construction—the process by which organisms build and maintain cause-effect models of their environment to guide adaptive behavior—can be understood through active inference, a framework in which organisms embody predictive models of the world optimized by perception, action, and learning. This paper proposes that cognitive niche construction itself is a cognitive function that optimizes these generative models, a process termed extended active inference. The account integrates ideas from extended mind theory, which holds that cognitive processes extend beyond the brain into the world, and predictive processing, offering a unified perspective on how organisms shape their niches to improve prediction and adaptive fitness.
Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science
November 1, 2020
Kathryn Nave, George Deane, Mark Miller et al.
The predictive processing framework describes the brain as a probabilistic prediction engine that constructs sensory experience from the top down. This paper argues that this view of the mind is embodied, deeply affective, and compatible with cognitive extension. Perception, action, homeostatic regulation, and emotion are all underpinned by the same predictive machinery. The authors conclude that predictive minds are deeply interwoven with, and may extend into, the surrounding social, cultural, and technological landscape.