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IntroductionMild intellectual disability or borderline intellectual functioning (MID/BIF) are common in people with severe mental health problems (SMHP). Despite this, there is a lack of treatments adapted for this group of clients.MethodsThis qualitative study describes the development of a new intervention, guided by the principles of action research, for people with SMHP and MID/BIF and mental health professionals to help them talk about all aspects of the process of recovery. The intervention was developed in four cycles and in close cooperation with mental health professionals, experts by experience, other experts in the field of SMHP or MID/BIF, and clients. During all cycles there was a strong focus on the content of the intervention, exercises, understandable language, and drawings for visual support.ResultsThis resulted in the intervention “Routes to Recovery,” which covers both complaints and strengths, coping strategies, helpful (social) activities, and how to determine future steps in a recovery plan.DiscussionRoutes to Recovery is a first step in helping professionals and their clients with SMHP and MID/BIF to have a conversation about personal strengths and what the client needs to recover. Future research should investigate the effects of this intervention.

The ecological approach to psychology has been a main antecedent of embodied and situated approaches to cognition. The concept of affordances in particular has gained currency throughout psychological science. Yet, contemporary ecological psychology has seemed inaccessible to outsiders and protective of its legacy. Indeed, some prominent ecological psychologists have presented their approach as a "package deal"—a principled and unified perspective on perception and action. Looking at the history of the field, however, we argue that ecological psychology has developed in rich and pluriform ways. Aiming to open the field to critical engagement and productive exchange, we identify three major strands of thought within ecological psychology, each of which emerged in the 20 years after Gibson's death: physical, biological, and social ecological psychology. Each of these strands develop ecological ideas in quite different directions, making different use of some of its central concepts, adopting different explanatory principles, and embodying different philosophical worldviews. Proponents of the ecological approach have been arguing for pluralism within cognitive science to make room for ecological psychology. Given the diversity of the strands, we extend this plea to within ecological psychology itself; the field is better off aiming for a productive pluralism in which the different strands are in dialogue with each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Mild intellectual disability or borderline intellectual functioning (MID/BIF) are common in people with severe mental health problems (SMHP). Despite this, there is a lack of treatments adapted for this group of clients. Methods: This qualitative study describes the development of a new intervention, guided by the principles of action research, for people with SMHP and MID/BIF and mental health professionals to help them talk about all aspects of the process of recovery. The intervention was developed in four cycles and in close cooperation with mental health professionals, experts by experience, other experts in the field of SMHP or MID/BIF, and clients. During all cycles there was a strong focus on the content of the intervention, exercises, understandable language, and drawings for visual support. Results: This resulted in the intervention "Routes to Recovery," which covers both complaints and strengths, coping strategies, helpful (social) activities, and how to determine future steps in a recovery plan. Discussion: Routes to Recovery is a first step in helping professionals and their clients with SMHP and MID/BIF to have a conversation about personal strengths and what the client needs to recover. Future research should investigate the effects of this intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even for simple perceptual decisions, the mechanisms that the brain employs are still under debate. Although current consensus states that the brain accumulates evidence extracted from noisy sensory information, open questions remain about how this simple model relates to other perceptual phenomena such as flexibility in decisions, decision-dependent modulation of sensory gain, or confidence about a decision. We propose a novel approach of how perceptual decisions are made by combining two influential formalisms into a new model. Specifically, we embed an attractor model of decision making into a probabilistic framework that models decision making as Bayesian inference. We show that the new model can explain decision making behaviour by fitting it to experimental data. In addition, the new model combines for the first time three important features: First, the model can update decisions in response to switches in the underlying stimulus. Second, the probabilistic formulation accounts for top-down effects that may explain recent experimental findings of decision-related gain modulation of sensory neurons. Finally, the model computes an explicit measure of confidence which we relate to recent experimental evidence for confidence computations in perceptual decision tasks.

What is it about our current digital technologies that seemingly makes it difficult for users to attend to what matters to them? According to the dominant narrative in the literature on the "attention economy," a user's lack of attention is due to the large amounts of information available in their everyday environments. I will argue that information-abundance fails to account for some of the central manifestations of distraction, such as sudden urges to check a particular information-source in the absence of perceptual information. I will use active inference, and in particular models of action selection based on the minimization of expected free energy, to develop an alternative answer to the question about what makes it difficult to attend. Besides obvious adversarial forms of inference, in which algorithms build up models of users in order to keep them scrolling, I will show that active inference provides the tools to identify a number of problematic structural features of current digital technologies: they contain limitless sources of novelty, they can be navigated by very simple and effortless motor movements, and they offer their action possibilities everywhere and anytime independent of place or context. Moreover, recent models of motivated control show an intricate interplay between motivation and control that can explain sudden transitions in motivational state and the consequent alteration of the salience of actions. I conclude, therefore, that the challenges users encounter when engaging with digital technologies are less about information overload or inviting content, but more about the continuous availability of easily available possibilities for action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this commentary on Rietveld's inaugural lecture, we exemplify with one of our design cases for project Expedition RWS 2050, how Rietveld's and our method are complementary. Within this project, RWS invited us to contribute our design skills and make relevant future scenarios experienceable. To scaffold imaginative discussions about everyday life in 2050 with a cross-section of the Dutch population, we wrote seven short speculative stories and designed a set of physical discussion tools. When looking at this design case and the cases Rietveld describes in his inaugural lecture, one can see that we both are guided by and contributing to the development of ecological and enactive philosophy, which rejects the dichotomy between sensorimotor and higher cognition. In his approach, Rietveld pushes the boundaries of the affordances of the material during the making process, whereas we predominantly investigate the affordances of the things and practices which we have designed. Despite these differences, we are both pursuing engagement with philosophical practice through non-discursive means while imagining new sociomaterial practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 35 commentaries cover a wide range of topics and take many different stances on the issues explored by the target article. We have organised our response to the commentaries around three central questions: Are Friston blankets just Pearl blankets? What ontological and metaphysical commitments are implied by the use of Friston blankets? What kind of explanatory work are Friston blankets capable of? We conclude our reply with a short critical reflection on the indiscriminate use of both Markov blankets and the free energy principle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The free energy principle, an influential framework in computational neuroscience and theoretical neurobiology, starts from the assumption that living systems ensure adaptive exchanges with their environment by minimizing the objective function of variational free energy. Following this premise, it claims to deliver a promising integration of the life sciences. In recent work, Markov blankets, one of the central constructs of the free energy principle, have been applied to resolve debates central to philosophy (such as demarcating the boundaries of the mind). The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we trace the development of Markov blankets starting from their standard application in Bayesian networks, via variational inference, to their use in the literature on active inference. We then identify a persistent confusion in the literature between the formal use of Markov blankets as an epistemic tool for Bayesian inference, and their novel metaphysical use in the free energy framework to demarcate the physical boundary between an agent and its environment. Consequently, we propose to distinguish between "Pearl blankets" to refer to the original epistemic use of Markov blankets and "Friston blankets" to refer to the new metaphysical construct. Second, we use this distinction to critically assess claims resting on the application of Markov blankets to philosophical problems. We suggest that this literature would do well in differentiating between two different research programmes: "inference with a model" and "inference within a model." Only the latter is capable of doing metaphysical work with Markov blankets, but requires additional philosophical premises and cannot be justified by an appeal to the success of the mathematical framework alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of affordances is rapidly gaining traction in the philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences. Affordances are opportunities for action provided by the environment. An important open question is whether affordances can be used to explain mental action such as attention, counting, and imagination. In this paper, we critically discuss McClelland’s (‘The Mental Affordance Hypothesis’, 2020, Mind, 129(514), pp. 401–427) mental affordance hypothesis. While we agree that the affordance concept can be fruitfully employed to explain mental action, we argue that McClelland’s mental affordance hypothesis contain remnants of a Cartesian understanding of the mind. By discussing the theoretical framework of the affordance competition hypothesis, we sketch an alternative research program based on the principles of embodied cognition that evades the Cartesian worries. We show how paradigmatic mental acts, such as imagination, counting, and arithmetic, are dependent on sensorimotor interaction with an affording environment. Rather than make a clear distinction between bodily and mental action, the mental affordances highlight the embodied nature of our mental action. We think that in developing our alternative research program on mental affordances, we can maintain many of the excellent insights of McClelland’s account without reintroducing the very distinctions that affordances were supposed to overcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prosen states that thirdwave extended minds should have plastic boundaries. I question the current literature’s focus on locating the boundaries of the mind and discuss whether the current literature falls prey to a metaphysics of domestication. I reassess Prosen’s two desiderata for a third-wave extended mind and argue that thirdwave extended mind theories are better off abandoning the “containment metaphor” altogether. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we investigate the foundations for a Gibsonian neuroscience. There is an increasingly influential current in neuroscience based on pragmatic and selectionist principles, which we think can contribute to ecological psychology. Starting from ecological psychology, we identify three basic constraints any Gibsonian neuroscience needs to adhere to: nonreconstructive perception, vicarious functioning, and selectionist self-organization. We discuss two previous attempts to integrate affordances with neuroscience: Reed's ecological rendering of Edelman's selectionism as well as Dreyfus' phenomenological interpretation of Freeman's neurodynamics. Reed and Dreyfus face the problem of how to account for "value." We then show how the free-energy principle, an increasingly dominant framework in theoretical neuroscience, is rooted in both Freeman's neurodynamics and Edelman's selectionism. The free-energy principle accounts for value in terms of selective anticipation. The selection pressures at work on the agent shape its selective sensitivity to the relevant affordances in the environment. By being responsive to the relevant affordances in the environment, an agent comes to have grip on its interactions with the environment and can thrive in its ecological niche. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The current article set out to review all research conducted to date investigating prospective memory (PM) in autism. Method: All studies on PM in autism are first described, followed by a critical review and discussion of experimental findings within the multiprocess framework. PM in autism is then considered through an embodied predictive-coding account of autism. Results: Overall, despite somewhat inconsistent methodologies, a general deficit in PM in autism is observed, with evidence mostly in line with the multiprocess framework. That is, for tasks that are high in cognitive and attentional demand (e.g. time-based tasks; event-based cues of non-focality or low salience) PM performance of autistic participants is impaired. Building upon previous work in predictive-coding, and the way in which expected precision modulates attention, we postulate mechanisms that underpin PM and the potential deficits seen in autism. Furthermore, a unifying predictive-coding account of autism is extended under embodied predictive-coding models, to show how a predictive-coding impairment accounts not only for characteristic autistic difficulties, but also for commonly found differences in autistic movement. Conclusions: We show how differences in perception and action, core to the development of autism, lead directly to problems seen in PM. Using this link between movement and PM, we then put forward a number of holistic, embodied interventions to support PM in autism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we set out to develop a theoretical and conceptual framework for the new field of Radical Embodied Cognitive Neuroscience. This framework should be able to integrate insights from several relevant disciplines: theory on embodied cognition, ecological psychology, phenomenology, dynamical systems theory, and neurodynamics. We suggest that the main task of Radical Embodied Cognitive Neuroscience is to investigate the phenomenon of skilled intentionality from the perspective of the self-organization of the brain-body-environment system, while doing justice to the phenomenology of skilled action. In previous work, we have characterized skilled intentionality as the organism's tendency toward an optimal grip on multiple relevant affordances simultaneously. Affordances are possibilities for action provided by the environment. In the first part of this paper, we introduce the notion of skilled intentionality and the phenomenon of responsiveness to a field of relevant affordances. Second, we use Friston's work on neurodynamics, but embed a very minimal version of his Free Energy Principle in the ecological niche of the animal. Thus amended, this principle is helpful for understanding the embeddedness of neurodynamics within the dynamics of the system "brain-body-landscape of affordances." Next, we show how we can use this adjusted principle to understand the neurodynamics of selective openness to the environment: interacting action-readiness patterns at multiple timescales contribute to the organism's selective openness to relevant affordances. In the final part of the paper, we emphasize the important role of metastable dynamics in both the brain and the brain-body-environment system for adequate affordance-responsiveness. We exemplify our integrative approach by presenting research on the impact of Deep Brain Stimulation on affordance responsiveness of OCD patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]