A World Unto Itself: Human Communication as Active Inference.

Area of Science:

• Developmental Psychology
• Cognitive Science
• Computational Neuroscience

Background:

• Humans possess an innate predisposition to align mental states with others.
• Cooperative communication intentionally aligns mental states regarding shared environmental events.
• Existing empirical evidence supports the role of cooperative communication in social interaction.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose an integrative model of the biobehavioral dynamics underlying cooperative communication.
• To extend current theoretical frameworks by incorporating active inference principles.
• To introduce novel computational hypotheses for the neurobiology of cooperative communication.

Main Methods:

• Formulation based on active inference, emphasizing action-perception cycles to minimize uncertainty.
• Proposal of an evolved adaptive prior belief in the alignment of mental states with conspecifics.
• Modeling cooperative communication as a mechanism for gathering evidence to support this prior belief.

Main Results:

• Cooperative communication facilitates the development of shared narratives that disambiguate mental states.
• Epistemic niche construction allows individuals to shape their environment to encode social cues.
• Alignment of mental states enables the emergence of cultural dynamics operating at a collective scale.

Conclusions:

• Cooperative communication is central to aligning mental states and constructing shared realities.
• The proposed active inference model offers neurobiologically plausible hypotheses for cooperative communication.
• Future research should explore the interplay between individual priors, niche construction, and cultural dynamics.