Post date: Oct 20, 2012 9:24:39 AM
Are goals the guiding principles of cognition?
Neuroscience has revealed that the actions of living organisms are organized around goals. Our ambition is going from this goal-centered view of action, towards a goal-centered view of all cognition. This view was actually popular in early cybernetics, where goal-setting and goal-monitoring processes were considered key to understand cognition.
Now that we have better knowledge of how goals of actions are encoded in the brain, we want to understand how the mechanisms of goal-directed action control are guided and coordinated by mechanisms of cognitive control to achieve distal objectives.
And there is more than this. Coherent with our emphasis on the Grounding higher cognition in sensorimotor and predictive loops, we hypothesizes that sensorimotor control and cognitive control could use the same principles and resources. We argue that the mechanisms of sensorimotor control of our earlier evolutionary ancestors have gradually transformed into mechanisms of “cognitive control” (i.e., the coordination and control of one’s own goals and thought processes to achieve distal objectives).
Our grounded approach is not the mainstream in the literature. Today the fields of sensorimotor and cognitive control are studied in isolation, often by different sub-communities of cognitive scientists. Most studies segregate higher cognition from sensorimotor processes (higher cognition is believed to operate on abstract, amodal representations deprived from sensorimotor aspects). We hope to shed light on the continuity of control processes (but also in evolution) from simpler to more complex, and show how living organisms can develop increasingly more sophisticated strategies to change their initial status of 'reactive machines' and become 'proactive and cognitive machines'.
Selected pubs:
Pezzulo, G., Cisek P. (2016) Navigating the Affordance Landscape: Feedback Control as a Process Model of Behavior and Cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 20 (6), 414-424 [link]
Stoianov, I., Genovesio, A., Pezzulo, G. (2016) Prefrontal goal-codes emerge as latent states in probabilistic value learning. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 28(1):140-57 [link][pdf]
Pezzulo, G. (2012). An active inference view of cognitive control. Frontiers in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. [link]
Pezzulo, G. and Castelfranchi, C. (2009). Intentional action: from anticipation to goal-directed behavior. Psychological Research, 73(4):437–440. [pdf]
Pezzulo, G. and Castelfranchi, C. (2009). Thinking as the control of imagination: a conceptual framework for goal-directed systems. Psychological Research, 73(4):559–577. [pdf]
Maisto, D., Donnarumma, F., and Pezzulo, G. (2013). Using subgoals to reduce the descriptive complexity of probabilistic inference and control programs. Unpublished proceedings of the 1st Multidisciplinary Conference on Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making. [pdf]