Higher-Level Cognition under Predictive Processing: Structural Representations, Grounded Cognition, and Conceptual Spaces

Predictive processing posits that prediction-error minimization underlies all perception, action, and cognition. Yet, despite its considerable popularity and explanatory scope, it is unclear how this enables higher-level cognitive abilities, such as representing and reasoning over abstract concepts. We combine insights from predictive processing, structural representations and grounded cognition to address this issue. Predictive processing argues from the free energy principle that an anticipatory model of the person-relevant environment is simulated. Structural representations state that these representations are isomorphic to, i.e., retain the relational pattern of, the world. Building on this assembly, grounded cognition research provides four insights into how abstract concepts are represented. First, a hierarchical organization allows abstracting from specific sensory qualities. Second, language glues together sensory qualities into representations that share no intrinsic properties, and acts as a social tool. Third, metaphoric mapping allows fragments of concrete percepts to represent abstract concepts. Lastly, conceptual spaces can represent concepts by generating multi-dimensional spaces consisting of abstract quality dimensions. By transplanting these four insights to predictive processing’s (structural) hierarchical generative model, we explain higher-level cognition through detached models of perception and action simulations, isomorphic to actual behavior, in abstract conceptual spaces. This constitutes a significant expansion to life-mind continuity approaches by providing specific mechanisms for how the principles driving the emergence of life can account for the sophisticated higher-level cognition in humans. By synthesizing insights from these three literatures, we generate a coherent description of higher-level cognition under predictive processing.