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Randall Hayes's avatar

Your initial diagram captures some interesting bits of what neuroscience has started calling "predictive coding" or "the predictive brain." The vast majority of even seemingly low-level perception relies on past memory to make predictions about what we expect, which incoming sensory information confirms or denies. Much faster processing that way.

Quick example: the blind spot where your optic nerve enters the retina. There are no photoreceptors in front of that. No light is ever captured there. Yet unless you close one eye and test for it specifically, you will never ever notice it.

https://www.arvo.org/globalassets/arvo/advocacy/advocacy-resources/illusions/blind-spot-flyer.pdf

So the division between inner and outer is real, but it's a lot more porous and nuanced than we generally like to acknowledge.

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Dave Gray's avatar

Is “predictive coding” similar to “perceptual cognition?” https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9789814360784_0005 or maybe related?

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Randall Hayes's avatar

Unsure because of the paywall and the truncated description. Plugging that exact phrase "perceptual cognition" into PubMed pulls up only nine results since 1977, but without the quotes, when it searches for the two concepts separately, there are almost 2400. "Predictive coding" (exact phrase) pulls up 164 papers, and they don't seem to overlap. So, at a guess, no, not the same.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=%22Perceptual+Cognition%22

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Perceptual+Cognition

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=%22Predictive+coding%22

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Dave Gray's avatar

I did a search for "predictive coding" and "perceptual processing" and although I couldn't access the papers, my guess from the abstracts is that predictive coding is a theory about how perceptual processing works

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Dave Gray's avatar

My mistake, the term was "perceptual processing" 3.3 in this paper

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David Pool's avatar

Excellent work Dave! Of course Peer-review is supposed to offer some value, but anonymous peer review has failed on occasion. I'd rather have transparent peer review so we have some accountability, moreover, what seems missing is Dialogue - the intelligent back and forth of intelligent reflection on the meaning of the ideas and the facts.

The thing is, I want more than random joe's trolling comments, I want intelligent dialogue with people who have the knowledge and capacity for intelligent input and response. Ray Dalio calls it believability weighted decision making.

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Randall Hayes's avatar

Anonymous peer review grew out of the fear of revenge. Contradicting a senior researcher is not a good career move, especially in a small job pool that relies on personal recommendations like many specialized academic fields do.

Today, with more open grievance processes, we could make the process more transparent. Which some journals, like the PLOS family, have done. You can even choose to publish your peer reviews alongside the article.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/editorial-and-peer-review-process

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Dave Gray's avatar

Interesting, thank you!

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Dave Gray's avatar

So interesting. The reason I got so up-in-arms about this was because I was writing books and wanted access to a lot of published research, which was often behind paywalls. So frustrating! Especially when you are not an academic and wanting to access the papers.

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David Pool's avatar

Granted, I am currently in a doctoral program so have the access you are referring to, and I agree with your point paywalls and the free flow of intelligent discussion of issues seem at odds with each other. So we have: 1) lack of affordable access to the material 2) an opaque process of quality review and 3) poor mechanisms for intelligent back and forth dialogue about what is claimed. These are things we should improve on the next revision of the process ;-)

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Dave Gray's avatar

Yes!

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