Predictive processing and situation models: constructing and reconstructing religious experience

Abstract

Taves and Asprem propose an integrated theory of event cognition and predictive coding and they apply their framework to the study of religious experience. We would like to commend the authors for their excellent initiative in further integrating the fields of religious studies and cognitive science. However, we also note two important challenges for the model related to (1) the precise role of predictive processing in religious experience and (2) readers’ bias and the reconstruction of situation models (Radvansky & Zacks, 2011). First, in Taves and Asprem’s article, classical theories of event cognition are extended and integrated within a predictive coding framework, according to which event models are updated based on prediction error signals. The authors propose that these event models are hierarchically organized, which applies well to event models for concrete actions (e.g., coffee making) that are characterized by a highly structured sequence of goals and sub-goals (e.g., van Elk, van Schie, & Bekkering, 2014). Eventually, religious ritual actions could also be considered as hierarchically organized such that a high-level goal (e.g., becoming a full member of the church) is achieved through a number of sub-goals (e.g., baptism, first communion), which in turn consist of low-level concrete actions (e.g., pouring water). However, when it comes to experiences, and even more specifically religious experiences, it is less clear that these are governed by hierarchically organized event models. Religious experiences differ in important ways from religious actions (i.e., experiences are often more passive, less structured, and less spatially and temporally constrained than actions), and do not entail a hierarchical organization of the features involved (e.g., such as “hearing God’s voice,” “loss of self,” “feeling ecstatic,” etc.). We argue that, although predictive coding indeed provides a powerful framework to account for a wide range of different effects and experiences, more specific predictive neurocognitive models are needed to account for key aspects of religious experiences instead. Specifically, predictive neurocognitive models of hallucinations (Fletcher & Frith, 2009), of the bodily self (Apps & Tsakiris, 2014), and of interoceptive inference and emotion (Seth, 2013) may be applied and extended to a religious context. For instance, auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia have been associated with decreased precision in efferent copy signals in association with self-generated inner speech (Fletcher & Frith, 2009). The accompanying difficulty in dissociating self-generated from externally generated effects could play a role in self-transcendent experiences as well (van Elk, 2015), which are often characterized by a blurring of the distinction between self and others. As a consequence of this proposed extension of the model, there is no unitary predictive coding account of religious experiences, but different aspects of experiences (e.g., feeling connected, ecstatic emotions, etc; cf. Piedmont, 1999) call for specific neurocognitive explanations that do not necessarily entail a hierarchical structure.