Submission 506
Context- and Event-Predictive-Inference Go Hand-in-Hand
SymposiumTalk-04
Presented by: Martin Butz
While we all receive continuous, dynamic sensory and motor information about our bodies and the outside environment, phenomenologically, we perceive a stable spatiotemporally segmented world. That is, we perceive and control dynamic interaction events as well as stative, durative events. We can even name these events verbally. Recent evidence suggests that event perception as well as the choice and execution of eventive interactions with our environment is embedded in a contextual frame, which appears to seamlessly focus cognition solving the frame problem. Within this contextual frame we plan, process, and control our perception, attention, and behaviour. Our cognitive modelling work shows that the installation of a contextual frame yields simulated model behaviour that best fits with human behaviour. Meanwhile, the work shows that contextual frame inference minimizes cognitive effort, which is quantified as changes in belief densities. Projecting the principle of contextual frame inference into problem solving domains – such as when solving tasks of an intelligence test or tasks of the abstraction and reasoning corpus (ARC) benchmark – similar contextual framing seems to be key to infer task-suitable eventive interactions and event progressions. It thus appears that cognition is segmented into events that are embedded into self-inferred contextual frames. The precise structure of such contextual frames, their goal-directed inference, and their more general involvement in cognition, however, still needs to be studied in further detail.