The cost of cognitive activity in a predictive coding framework
-
1
Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium
-
2
Institute de Neurosciences Cognitives et Intégratives d'Aquitaine, France
Cognitive activity is effortful and we tend to avoid cognitively demanding tasks. Despite the profound socioeconomic implication, we still don’t understand the origin of this subjective cost. We propose that cognitive effort can be formalized in the framework of predictive coding. This influential theory posits that the brain develops a hierarchical model of the world and that percepts and actions are shaped by continuous predictions of the incoming sensory information. Hence, in order to maintain our predictions accurate, we have to dynamically update our internal models. Here, we propose that such model updating incurs a certain cost, which, in turn, determines our perception of cognitive effort. We designed a novel category learning task in order to dissect the link between various aspects of model updating on the one hand, and task aversion and effort perception on the other hand. We used standard questionnaires and pupil size recording to evaluate subjective effort. We also used Hierarchical Gaussian Filters to model the evolution of subjects’ beliefs about stimulus category and hence, infer internal model updating. Our preliminary results (N=28) show that effort estimates were considerably higher for high category overlap as compared to low overlap. Given that high category overlap condition was also characterized by increased model updating, these early findings seem to be in accordance with our initial hypothesis.
Keywords:
cognitive cost,
mental effort,
predictive coding,
prediction errors,
Hierarchical Gaussian Filter
Conference:
12th National Congress of the Belgian Society for Neuroscience, Gent, Belgium, 22 May - 22 May, 2017.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Cognition and Behavior
Citation:
Solopchuk
O and
Zénon
A
(2019). The cost of cognitive activity in a predictive coding framework.
Front. Neurosci.
Conference Abstract:
12th National Congress of the Belgian Society for Neuroscience.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2017.94.00110
Copyright:
The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers.
They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters.
The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated.
Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed.
For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions.
Received:
20 Apr 2017;
Published Online:
25 Jan 2019.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Oleg Solopchuk, Université catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium, 489450@frontiersin.org