Event-Predictive Active Inference: Developing Conceptual, Compositional Cognition from Sensorimotor Experiences

Hello, and welcome to the Active Inference Lab. Today it is October 25th, 2021, and we are here in Active Guest Stream number 12.1 with Martin Boots. So this is going to be an awesome presentation and discussion. If you're watching live, please feel free to add any questions into the live chat and we'll be compiling those. And otherwise we're just going to have a presentation and then discussion interval. So Martin, thanks so much for joining our lab to give this presentation and we're really looking forward to what you have to share. Yeah, a big pleasure to be here tonight or this morning, I guess, for you guys in California. So let's see if I get the screen sharing here right again. We practiced it before. This should be this one here. Looks great. And now I just need to have at least one video on the side here for me. So yeah, big pleasure to present our lab's work on, which I call event predictive active inference, and particularly also modeling the development of conceptual compositional cognition from sensory motor experiences. You might have already kind of noticed the picture here, this artistic picture on the top right. And I think it shows nicely and intuitively how our brain continuously seems to attempt to infer the hidden causes behind our sensory perceptions. And thus this kind of terrace is kind of bent for us a little bit because the top part, of course, just can be interpreted in two ways. And this is obviously not quite rightly positioned or it cannot be like this in reality. I'll give you a couple of other examples. What I mean by this active inference, which is known to or explained often by Carl Fristen and others to essentially develop latent hidden states, to explain away the sensory perceptions by inferring the hidden causes behind them. So here you see a color illustration, which is called a color illusion sometimes, where you probably won't believe it. I have to measure it each time again to make sure that I'm really right. But essentially in this yellow tinted figure, essentially this blue colored squares here, they are essentially grayscale. Now they are, if you test them by, in a graphics program, you will see that this is a grayscale position. So all blue points here are in fact grayscale. And here on this side with a blue tinted background, you essentially have the same situation, but it's the yellow pieces that are actually grayscale. This is illustrated here on the right a little bit. And this just shows essentially that our brain is interpreting its sensory perceptions in the light, more analogically fitting here, of the circumstances. And in this case, yellow light makes a true blue square appear gray when we look at it. So we perceive it gray. The sensory stimulation is gray, but the true cause behind it must be a blue square. So our brain essentially correctly and actively infers that this square is most likely blue because under this yellow light conditions, it appears gray. And we're not even aware of that. So this is a lovely example of a very low level inference process in our brain that takes into account the situation and essentially puts the perceptual sensory information in this event, this light event, this lightning condition, essentially. Another nice example of this is shadows that I found here online from from some artistic exhibition. And you have here two shadows. And as long as you look at the shadows and you perceive the shadows, you kind of not only perceive the shadows, but you perceive a person and the illustration of a person. And to a certain extent, you have the feeling that some person must be standing here somewhere such that I will perceive these shadows. But lo and behold, this situation is totally different. These are actually cool artistic sculptures that produce the shadows. And again, you see that, yeah, you have perceived the shadow and interpreted not only the shadow, but created a whole scene, a whole event like with a light source and the person in the…