Clark’s (in press) paper gives us an adept introduction into the potential for the concept of the predictive brain to provide us with an integrative and unifying framework to explain cognition. Indeed, this raises an abundance of new questions for possible future work to address. It also highlights the necessity for much gap-filling that will arise through the inevitable application of these principles to different aspects of cognition, as the breadth of the promise of the predictive brain in explaining neural and psychological phenomena becomes wider. Clark touches on some possible expansions of the predictive brain into the realm of social neuroscience. In this commentary, the relatively new hypothesis of the “social predictive brain” is presented. We argue that there is already a large body of empirical and theoretical neuroscientific work from neurophysiological, behavioral, and computational perspectives that provide substantial evidence for a fundamental role for predictive mechanisms in the processing of social information and in social interaction. Further to this, we propose that the evolution of social cognitive processes, or in other words, the evolution of the social brain, has been built upon the increasing complexity of the predictive mechanisms of perception, action, and learning, which Clark outlines in his paper.
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