Abstract
For decades, a common assumption in cognitive neuroscience has been that prefrontal executive control is mainly engaged during target detection [Posner, M. I., & Petersen, S. E. The attention system of the human brain. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 13, 25-42, 1990]. More recently, predictive processing theories of frontal function under the Bayesian brain hypothesis emphasize a key role of proactive control for anticipatory action selection (i.e., planning as active inference). Here, we review evidence of fast and widespread EEG and magnetoencephalographic fronto-temporo-parietal cortical activations elicited by feedback cues and target cards in the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test. This evidence is best interpreted when considering negative and positive feedback as predictive cues (i.e., sensory outcomes) for proactively updating beliefs about unknown perceptual categories. Such predictive cues inform posterior beliefs about high-level hidden categories governing subsequent response selection at target onset. Quite remarkably, these new views concur with Don Stuss' early findings concerning two broad classes of P300 cortical responses evoked by feedback cues and target cards in a computerized Wisconsin Card Sorting Test analogue. Stuss' discussion of those P300 responses-in terms of the resolution of uncertainty about response (policy) selection as well as the participants' expectancies for future perceptual or motor activities and their timing-was prescient of current predictive processing and active (Bayesian) inference theories. From these new premises, a domain-general frontoparietal cortical network is rapidly engaged during two temporarily distinct stages of inference and learning of perceptual categories that underwrite goal-directed card sorting behavior, and they each engage prefrontal executive functions in fundamentally distinct ways.
Highlights
In recent years, there has been a paradigm shift in the cognitive neurosciences motivated by views of the brain as a prediction machine, whose working principle is to make active (Bayesian) inferences about the causes of its sensory inputs (Friston, 2005, 2010)
There has been a paradigm shift in the cognitive neurosciences motivated by views of the brain as a prediction machine, whose working principle is to make active (Bayesian) inferences about the causes of its sensory inputs (Friston, 2005, 2010). The implications of this new theory of cortical responses are examined for a deeper understanding of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test ( WCST), one of the most distinctive tests of frontal lobe function (Milner, 1963)
Given the relevance of surprise minimization under active inference, the thread of this paper will revolve around the P300 family of cortical responses, one of the most widely used EEG indexes of cognition, which has been linked to surprise and uncertainty resolution ever since its discovery (Donchin, 1981; Sutton, Braren, Zubin, & John, 1965)
Summary
There has been a paradigm shift in the cognitive neurosciences motivated by views of the brain as a prediction machine, whose working principle is to make active (Bayesian) inferences about the causes of its sensory inputs (Friston, 2005, 2010). The active inference and predictive processing frameworks (Friston, 2005, 2019; Hohwy, 2019; Friston et al, 2017; Clark, 2013), together with the revival of enactivism in cognitive science (O’Regan & Noe, 2001), underwrite actionoriented cognition with concepts such as sensorimotor contingencies and perception–action cycles for a full understanding of higher cognitive functions in humans (Fuster, 2013) According to these views, a common ruling principle underlies perception (i.e., sensory state estimation), action (i.e., response policy selection), and learning (i.e., perceptual and reinforcement learning), which is to minimize the same information theory quantity in our brains called the “free energy.”. P3-like responses offer sufficient topographical and temporal resolution to assess high- and low-level belief updating at frontal and posterior multimodal association cortices, during the inference and learning of perceptual categories in card sorting
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