The Universal Optimism of the Self-Evidencing Mind.

Karl Friston's free-energy principle casts agents as self-evidencing through active inference. This implies that decision-making, planning and information-seeking are, in a generic sense, 'wishful'. We take an interdisciplinary perspective on this perplexing aspect of the free-energy principle and unpack the epistemological implications of wishful thinking under the free-energy principle. We use this epistemic framing to discuss the emergence of biases for self-evidencing agents. In particular, we argue that this elucidates an optimism bias as a foundational tenet of self-evidencing. We allude to a historical precursor to some of these themes, interestingly found in Machiavelli's oeuvre, to contextualise the universal optimism of the free-energy principle.

Depersonalization affects self-prioritization of bodily, but not abstract self-related information.

Depersonalization is a common and distressing experience characterized by a feeling of estrangement from one's self, body, and the world. In order to examine the relationship between depersonalization and selfhood we conducted an experimental study comparing processing of three types of self-related information between nonclinical groups of people experiencing high and low levels of depersonalization. Using a sequential matching task, we compared three types of biases for processing of self-related information: prioritization of one's name, of self-associated abstract stimuli (geometrical shapes), and of self-associated bodily stimuli (avatar faces). We found that both groups demonstrated the standard pattern of results for self-prioritization of one's name and geometrical shapes, but they differed with regard to avatar faces. While people with low depersonalization showed the standard prioritization of avatar faces, people with high depersonalization showed overall better response accuracy with avatar faces, and faster response times for stranger-associated avatar faces. These results were complemented by the additional finding that people with high depersonalization reported being more likely to use avatars of a different gender to their own outside of the experimental context. Finally, in this large sample (N = 180) we investigated the relationships between different measures of self-related processing and self-identification, finding no correlation between explicit reports of self-identification with self-associated avatar faces and geometrical shapes, self-prioritization of these stimuli, and prioritization of one's name. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Accelerating scientific progress through Bayesian adversarial collaboration.

Adversarial collaboration has been championed as the gold standard for resolving scientific disputes but has gained relatively limited traction in neuroscience and allied fields. In this perspective, we argue that adversarial collaborative research has been stymied by an overly restrictive concern with the falsification of scientific theories. We advocate instead for a more expansive view that frames adversarial collaboration in terms of Bayesian belief updating, model comparison, and evidence accumulation. This framework broadens the scope of adversarial collaboration to accommodate a wide range of informative (but not necessarily definitive) studies while affording the requisite formal tools to guide experimental design and data analysis in the adversarial setting. We provide worked examples that demonstrate how these tools can be deployed to score theoretical models in terms of a common metric of evidence, thereby furnishing a means of tracking the amount of empirical support garnered by competing theories over time.

Fenneman et al.'s (2022) review of formal impulsivity models: Implications for theory and measures of impulsivity.

In Fenneman et al.'s (2022) review of theories and integrated impulsivity model, the authors distinguish between information impulsivity (i.e., acting without considering consequences) and temporal impulsivity (i.e., the tendency to pick sooner outcomes over later ones). The authors find that both types of impulsivity can be adaptive in different contexts. For example, when individuals experience scarcity of resources or when they are close to a minimum level of reserves (critical threshold). In this commentary, we extend their findings to a discussion about the measurement of impulsivity. We argue that a common method for measuring temporal impulsivity in which people make decisions between outcomes that are spaced out in time (intertemporal choice tasks), puts individuals in a specific context that is unlikely to generalize well to other situations. Furthermore, trait measures of impulsivity may only be modestly informative about future impulsive behavior because they largely abstract away from important context. To address these issues, we advocate for the development of dynamic measures of the two types of impulsivity. We argue that measuring temporal impulsivity in naturalistic contexts with varying environmental and state parameters could provide insights into whether individuals (i.e., humans and nonhuman animals) react to environmental changes adaptively, while trait measures of impulsivity more generally should collect and provide more contextual information. Dynamic measurement of different types of impulsivity will also allow for more discussion about adaptive impulsive responses in different contexts, which could help combat the stigmatization of various disorders associated with impulsivity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Do contemplative practices make us more moral?

Contemplative practices are a staple of modern life and have historically been intertwined with morality. However, do these practices in fact improve our morality? The answer remains unclear because the science of contemplative practices has focused on unidimensional aspects of morality, which do not align with the type of interdependent moral functioning these practices aspire to cultivate. Here, we appeal to a multifactor construct, which allows the assessment of outcomes from a contemplative intervention across multiple dimensions of moral cognition and behavior. This offers an open-minded and empirically rigorous investigation into the impact of contemplative practices on moral actions. Using this framework, we gain insight into the effect of mindfulness meditation on morality, which we show does indeed have positive influences, but also some negative influences, distributed across our moral functioning.

Episodic future thinking and compassion reduce non-compliance urges regarding public health guidelines: a randomised controlled trial.

BACKGROUND: People often feel urges to engage in activities that violate pandemic public health guidelines. Research on these urges has been reliant on measures of typical behaviour, which fail to capture these urges as they unfold. Guideline adherence could be improved through interventions, but few methods allow for ecologically valid observation of the range of behaviours that pandemic guidelines prescribe. METHODS: In this preregistered parallel randomised trial, 95 participants aged 18-65 from the UK were assigned to three groups using blinded block randomisation, and engaged in episodic future thinking (n = 33), compassion exercises (n = 31), or a control procedure (n = 31). Following an ecological momentary assessment procedure, participants report on the intensity of their occurrent urges (min. 1, max. 10) and their ability to control them. The study further investigates whether, and through which mechanism, state impulsivity and vaccine attitudes affect guideline adherence. RESULTS: Episodic future thinking (b = -1.80) and compassion exercises (b = -1.45) reduced the intensity of urges. State impulsivity is associated with stronger urges, but we found no evidence that vaccine hesitancy predicts lesser self-control. CONCLUSIONS: We conclude that episodic future thinking exercises and compassion training may be used to decrease non-compliance urges of individuals who are an acute public health risk for the community, such as those in voluntary isolation.

Combining novel trait and neurocognitive frameworks to parse heterogeneity in borderline personality disorder.

OBJECTIVE: Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) diagnosis comprises several constellations of trait, neurocognitive, and psychosocial alterations. Dimensional models of psychopathology provide new opportunities to parse heterogeneity and create a stronger interface between individual characterization and psychosocial outcomes. However, dimensional models have focused on either traits or neurocognitive features, lacking integration to capture the multifaceted nature of BPD. METHOD: We assessed 100 participants with BPD using a combination of tools stemming from trait (Alternative Model for Personality Disorders) and neurocognitive models (Research Domain Criteria; RDoC) to examine if trait-derived subgroups display distinctive social-processing and psychosocial profiles. We used two complementary analytical approaches: person-centered (k-means clustering) and construct-based (multiple factor analysis). RESULTS: Our person-centered approach identified four subgroups with separable internalizing, detached, externalizing, and low psychopathology trait profiles. These profiles revealed distinctive patterns of affiliation, emotion recognition and mentalization performance in RDoC tasks, and psychosocial measures of quality of life and social connectedness. RDoC-based measures showed close construct proximity with negative affectivity, disinhibition, and antagonism trait domains, relative to the detachment domain, which had close proximity with self-knowledge. CONCLUSIONS: Altogether, findings support consilience between trait-based and neurobiological frameworks and suggest that trait models are useful to parse BPD heterogeneity leading to unique social functioning profiles.

Expectations boost the reconstruction of auditory features from electrophysiological responses to noisy speech.

Online speech processing imposes significant computational demands on the listening brain, the underlying mechanisms of which remain poorly understood. Here, we exploit the perceptual "pop-out" phenomenon (i.e. the dramatic improvement of speech intelligibility after receiving information about speech content) to investigate the neurophysiological effects of prior expectations on degraded speech comprehension. We recorded electroencephalography (EEG) and pupillometry from 21 adults while they rated the clarity of noise-vocoded and sine-wave synthesized sentences. Pop-out was reliably elicited following visual presentation of the corresponding written sentence, but not following incongruent or neutral text. Pop-out was associated with improved reconstruction of the acoustic stimulus envelope from low-frequency EEG activity, implying that improvements in perceptual clarity were mediated via top-down signals that enhanced the quality of cortical speech representations. Spectral analysis further revealed that pop-out was accompanied by a reduction in theta-band power, consistent with predictive coding accounts of acoustic filling-in and incremental sentence processing. Moreover, delta-band power, alpha-band power, and pupil diameter were all increased following the provision of any written sentence information, irrespective of content. Together, these findings reveal distinctive profiles of neurophysiological activity that differentiate the content-specific processes associated with degraded speech comprehension from the context-specific processes invoked under adverse listening conditions.

Foraging for the self: Environment selection for agency inference.

Sometimes agents choose to occupy environments that are neither traditionally rewarding nor worth exploring, but which rather promise to help minimise uncertainty related to what they can control. Selecting environments that afford inferences about agency seems a foundational aspect of environment selection dynamics - if an agent can't form reliable beliefs about what they can and can't control, then they can't act efficiently to achieve rewards. This relatively neglected aspect of environment selection is important to study so that we can better understand why agents occupy certain environments over others - something that may also be relevant for mental and developmental conditions, such as autism. This online experiment investigates the impact of uncertainty about agency on the way participants choose to freely move between two environments, one that has greater irreducible variability and one that is more complex to model. We hypothesise that increasingly erroneous predictions about the expected outcome of agency-exploring actions can be a driver of switching environments, and we explore which type of environment agents prefer. Results show that participants actively switch between the two environments following increases in prediction error, and that the tolerance for prediction error before switching is modulated by individuals' autism traits. Further, we find that participants more frequently occupy the variable environment, which is predicted by greater accuracy and higher confidence than the complex environment. This is the first online study to investigate relatively unconstrained ongoing foraging dynamics in support of judgements of agency, and in doing so represents a significant methodological advance.

An active inference model of conscious access: How cognitive action selection reconciles the results of report and no-report paradigms.

Cognitive theories of consciousness, such as global workspace theory and higher-order theories, posit that frontoparietal circuits play a crucial role in conscious access. However, recent studies using no-report paradigms have posed a challenge to cognitive theories by demonstrating conscious accessibility in the apparent absence of prefrontal cortex (PFC) activation. To address this challenge, this paper presents a computational model of conscious access, based upon active inference, that treats working memory gating as a cognitive action. We simulate a visual masking task and show that late P3b-like event-related potentials (ERPs), and increased PFC activity, are induced by the working memory demands of self-report generation. When reporting demands are removed, these late ERPs vanish and PFC activity is reduced. These results therefore reproduce, and potentially explain, results from no-report paradigms. However, even without reporting demands, our model shows that simulated PFC activity on visible stimulus trials still crosses the threshold for reportability - maintaining the link between PFC and conscious access. Therefore, our simulations show that evidence provided by no-report paradigms does not necessarily contradict cognitive theories of consciousness.

Bayesian realism and structural representation.

We challenge the authors' view that Markov blankets are illicitly reified when used to describe organismic boundaries. We do this both on general methodological grounds, where we appeal to a form of structural realism derived from Bayesian cognitive science to dissolve the problem, and by rebutting specific arguments in the target article.

Modelling pandemic behaviour using an economic multiplayer game.

During a pandemic, isolating oneself from the community limits viral transmission and helps avoid repeated societal lockdowns. This entails a social dilemma-either distance oneself from others for the benefit of the public good or free-ride and enjoy the benefits of freedom. It is not yet understood how the unfamiliar incentive structure and interpersonal context presented by a pandemic together modulate individuals' approach to this social dilemma. In this preregistered study, we take a game-theoretical approach and investigate people's decisions to self-isolate, using a novel iterated multiplayer game designed to capture the decision-making environment in the pandemic. To elucidate players' thinking, we use a variation of the strategy method and elicit beliefs about how much others will self-isolate. Players tend to respond to social norms with abidance, rather than transgression; they resist the temptation to freeride when others are self-isolating. However, they deal with exponential growth poorly, as they only self-isolate sufficiently when lockdowns are imminent. Further, increased collective risk can motivate more self-isolation, even though the link between self-isolation and lockdowns is stochastic. Players underreport the influence of others' choices on their own, and underestimate others' self-isolation. We discuss implications for public health, and communication to the public.

State impulsivity amplifies urges without diminishing self-control.

A disproportionate amount of research on impulsivity has focused on trait-related aspects rather than state fluctuations. As a result, the relationship between state impulsivity and moment-to-moment behaviour is unclear. Impulsivity is assumed to negatively affect self-control, but an alternative explanation, yet to be tested, could be that changes in state impulsivity and its homeostatic drivers influence the intensity of urges. We tested whether state impulsivity and hunger affected behaviour through a dual-process model, affecting both the experience of various urges, and self-control, using a smartphone-based experience sampling approach. We found that state impulsivity is associated with stronger urges, but we found no evidence of an association with diminished self-control. Being hungry amplifies urges across different types of urges, and both hunger and late hours are negatively related to the likelihood of controlling urges. These findings imply that the influence of hunger is not limited to the food domain, and provide new insight into the role of state impulsivity in daily life.

How selves differ within and across cognitive domains: self-prioritisation, self-concept, and psychiatric traits.

BACKGROUND: How we build and maintain representations of ourselves involves both explicit features which are consciously accessible on reflection and implicit processes which are not, such as attentional biases. Understanding relations between different ways of measuring self-cognition both within and across such cognitive domains is important for understanding how selves may differ from one another, and whether self-cognition is best understood as largely uni-dimensional or more multi-dimensional. Further, uncovering this structure should inform research around how self-cognition relates to psychiatric and psychological conditions. This study explores the relations between different constructs of self-cognition and how variability within them relates to psychiatric traits. METHODS: Our final dataset includes within-subject (n = 288, general population) measures of explicit self-concept (using both the Self Concept Clarity Scale and Self Concept and Identity Measure), implicit self-prioritisation in a shape-label matching task (for both reaction time and sensitivity) and measurement of traits for five psychiatric conditions (autism, borderline personality disorder, schizophrenia, depression and anxiety). We first test whether self-cognitive measures within and across domains are correlated within individuals. We then test whether these dimensions of self-cognition support a binary distinction between psychiatric conditions that either are or are not characterised in terms of self, or whether they support self-cognition as transdiagnostically predictive of the traits associated with psychiatric conditions. To do this we run a series of planned correlations, regressions, and direct correlation comparison statistics. RESULTS: Results show that implicit self-prioritisation measures were not correlated with the explicit self-concept measures nor the psychiatric trait measures. In contrast, all the psychiatric traits scores were predicted, to varying degrees, by poorer explicit self-concept quality. Specifically, borderline personality disorder traits were significantly more strongly associated with composite explicit self-concept measures than any of depression, anxiety, or autism traits scores were. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that selves can differ considerably, along different cognitive dimensions. Further, our results show that self-cognition may be a promising feature to include in future dimensional characterisations of psychiatric conditions, but care should be taken to choose relevant self-cognitive domains.

Differences in working memory coding of biological motion attributed to oneself and others.

The question how the brain distinguishes between information about self and others is of fundamental interest to both philosophy and neuroscience. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we sought to distinguish the neural substrates of representing a full-body movement as one's movement and as someone else's movement. Participants performed a delayed match-to-sample working memory task where a retained full-body movement (displayed using point-light walkers) was arbitrarily labeled as one's own movement or as performed by someone else. By using arbitrary associations we aimed to address a limitation of previous studies, namely that our own movements are more familiar to us than movements of other people. A searchlight multivariate decoding analysis was used to test where information about types of movement and about self-association was coded. Movement specific activation patterns were found in a network of regions also involved in perceptual processing of movement stimuli, however not in early sensory regions. Information about whether a memorized movement was associated with the self or with another person was found to be coded by activity in the left middle frontal gyrus (MFG), left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), bilateral supplementary motor area, and (at reduced threshold) in the left temporoparietal junction (TPJ). These areas are frequently reported as involved in action understanding (IFG, MFG) and domain-general self/other distinction (TPJ). Finally, in univariate analysis we found that selecting a self-associated movement for retention was related to increased activity in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex.

Zoomed out: digital media use and depersonalization experiences during the COVID-19 lockdown.

Depersonalisation is a common dissociative experience characterised by distressing feelings of being detached or 'estranged' from one's self and body and/or the world. The COVID-19 pandemic forcing millions of people to socially distance themselves from others and to change their lifestyle habits. We have conducted an online study of 622 participants worldwide to investigate the relationship between digital media-based activities, distal social interactions and peoples' sense of self during the lockdown as contrasted with before the pandemic. We found that increased use of digital media-based activities and online social e-meetings correlated with higher feelings of depersonalisation. We also found that the participants reporting higher experiences of depersonalisation, also reported enhanced vividness of negative emotions (as opposed to positive emotions). Finally, participants who reported that lockdown influenced their life to a greater extent had higher occurrences of depersonalisation experiences. Our findings may help to address key questions regarding well-being during a lockdown, in the general population. Our study points to potential risks related to overly sedentary, and hyper-digitalised lifestyle habits that may induce feelings of living in one's 'head' (mind), disconnected from one's body, self and the world.

Cory COVID-Bot: An Evidence-Based Behavior Change Chatbot for COVID-19.

Cory COVID-Bot is an artificial intelligence chatbot designed and built by a multisector collaboration to help people safely step towards COVID normal. Achieving COVID normal and avoiding unnecessary adverse health outcomes requires effective communication to the public regarding COVID safe behaviors, but reaching young, culturally and linguistically diverse members of the community is challenging for government. Cory COVID-Bot was developed to directly engage with difficult to reach populations in English and Vietnamese. In order to resolve public ambiguity and uncertainty about public health guidelines, and to stimulate safe behavior, Cory COVID-Bot provides updated recommendations and behavior change interventions, which emphasize the importance of COVID safe behaviors.

Risk perception, illusory superiority and personal responsibility during COVID-19: An experimental study of attitudes to staying home.

Little is known about how different government communication strategies may systematically affect people's attitudes to staying home or going out during the COVID-19 pandemic, nor how people perceive and process the risk of viral transmission in different scenarios. In this study, we report results from two experiments that examine the degree to which people's attitudes regarding the permissibility of leaving one's home are (1) sensitive to different levels of risk of viral transmission in specific scenarios, (2) sensitive to communication framings that are either imperative or that emphasize personal responsibility, or (3) creating 'loopholes' for themselves, enabling a more permissive approach to their own compliance. We find that the level of risk influences attitudes to going out, and that participants report less permissive attitudes to going out when prompted with messages framed in imperative terms, rather than messages emphasizing personal responsibility; for self-loopholes, we find no evidence that participants' attitudes towards going out in specific scenarios are more permissive for themselves than for others. However, participants report they are more rigorous in staying home than others, which may cause moral licensing. Additionally, we find that age is negatively associated with permissive attitudes, and that male participants are more permissive to going out. Thus, during phases where it is important to promote staying home for all scenarios, including those perceived to be low-risk, imperative communication may be best suited to increase compliance.

Waiting longer, feeling fatter: Effects of response delay on tactile distance estimation and confidence in females with anorexia nervosa.

BACKGROUND: Research suggests that patients with anorexia nervosa (AN) exhibit differences in the perceptual processing of their own bodies. However, some researchers suggest that these differences are better explained with reference to non-perceptual factors, such as demand characteristics or emotional responses to the task. In this study, we investigated whether overestimation of tactile distances in participants with AN results from differences in tactile processing or non-perceptual factors, by measuring the role of allowed response time in an adapted version of the tactile distance estimation task (TDE-D). We further investigated the relationship between allowed response time and participants' confidence in their tactile judgments. METHOD: Our sample consisted of females: participants with AN (n = 30), recovered (REC) participants (n = 29) and healthy controls (HC) (n = 31). Participants were asked to estimate tactile distances presented on the skin of either a salient (abdomen) or non-salient (arm) body part, either directly after stimulus presentation (direct condition) or after a 5 s delay (delayed condition). Confidence of estimation accuracy was measured after each response. RESULTS: Results showed that allowing AN and REC more time to respond caused them to estimate tactile distances as larger. Additionally, participants with AN became less confident when given more time to respond. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that non-perceptual influences cause participants with AN to increase their estimates of tactile distances and become less certain of these estimates. We speculate that previous findings-where participants with AN estimate tactile distances as larger than HC-may be due to non-perceptual differences.