Commentary: The Problem of Mental Action: Predictive Control Without Sensory Sheets

摘要

Action-oriented and pragmatic views of cognition, which propose that the action system is part and parcel of various cognitive functions (e.g., perception, memory, and decision-making), are increasingly popular in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and robotics (Engel et al., 2016). Different theories stress distinct aspects of action-directedness, such as for example the importance of sensory-motor regularities or contingencies to steer active perception loops (O'Regan and Noe, 2001; Ahissar and Assa, 2016); the reuse of the brain's motor system for “action simulation,” in the service of action perception, imagery, and planning (Jeannerod, 2006); that the brain may be organized to rapidly specify and select actions (Cisek, 1999; Cisek and Kalaska, 2010; Pezzulo and Cisek, 2016). There is however one aspect of action-directedness that has received less attention so far: the possibility for cognitive agents to perform mental actions.