Abstract
The human brain is tightly coupled to the world through its sensory‐motor systems—but it also spends a lot of its metabolism talking to itself. One important function of this intrinsic activity is the establishment and updating of event models—representations of the current situation that can predictively guide perception, learning, and action control. Here, we propose that event models largely depend on the default network (DN) midline core that includes the posterior cingulate and anterior medial prefrontal cortex. An increasing body of data indeed suggests that this subnetwork can facilitate stimuli processing during both naturalistic event comprehension and cognitive tasks in which mental representations of prior situations, trials, and task rules can predictively guide attention and performance. This midline core involvement in supporting predictions through event models can make sense of an otherwise complex and conflicting pattern of results regarding the possible cognitive functions subserved by the DN.
Highlights
How does the brain place itself in a position to deal with the twists and turns of complex situations? One possibility is that it builds generative models of current situations and uses these representations to drive predictions about what will happen in the near future
Our proposal agrees with this statement, and we suggest that these compound predictions likely correspond to event models that are supported by the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC)
According to our speculative proposal, a major function of event models is to support predictions about the immediate situation, which facilitates the interpretation of the ongoing activity and guides future behaviors
Summary
How does the brain place itself in a position to deal with the twists and turns of complex situations? One possibility is that it builds generative models of current situations and uses these representations to drive predictions about what will happen in the near future. In contrast to the view that the midline DN areas exclusively support self-generated mentation that stands in a push–pull relationship to the processing of external stimuli, a body of data suggests the midline DN core might be involved in maintaining mental representations of task rules and previously presented stimuli to guide behavior and facilitate task performance (for a related proposal, see Margulies & Smallwood, 2017) This suggests that these regions play a key role in integrating internally generated representations—including information and knowledge retrieved from long-term memory —with recently acquired information from sensory inputs to guide ongoing processing. What sort of representation might accomplish this integration? We propose that these representations are event models
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