Researchers originally tested the predictive coding hypothesis in the domains of basic sensation, such as vision and audition ( Hohwy et al., 2008 Vuust et al., 2009). These continual predictions help to fill in gaps in one’s perception and allow us to plan our actions by anticipating future states of the world ( Knill and Pouget, 2004 Friston and Kiebel, 2009 Friston, 2010, 2012). Instead, they make predictions about the likely future, and continually compare these predictions against new sensory data. The theory of predictive coding suggests that when people perceive the world, their brains do not merely process and encode incoming information ( Rao and Ballard, 1999). While watching a ball fly through the air, people can simultaneously recognize its current location and predict its future trajectory, thereby allowing them to turn their back on it momentarily and still run to the right spot to catch it. The human perceptual system constantly engages in this kind of reflexive prediction. We propose that the brain automatically predicts others’ future actions while perceiving their current actions. While these sources of information are well-studied predictors of actions, here we examine another source of information about people’s future actions: their current actions. Knowing what personality traits a person possesses, what mental state they currently occupy, or what situation they find themselves in could all inform inferences about their likely future actions ( Abbott et al., 1985 Gilbert and Malone, 1995 Frijda, 2004 Gibson, 2014). People can draw upon many types of knowledge to inform such action predictions. To help a friend achieve their goals, one must understand the sequence of actions they will take to reach those goals to hinder an enemy, one must likewise predict their upcoming moves. However, to truly succeed in the social world, one also needs to predict others’ future actions. In order to navigate the social world, one needs to be able to accurately recognize and understand others’ current actions (Thornton and Tamir, 2019b). People are constantly talking, eating, working, playing, walking, jumping, snoozing and so on. The social world is abuzz with people doing things. This finding suggests that the brain represents actions using a six-dimensional action space that gives people an automatic glimpse of future actions.Īction, predictive coding, social cognition, naturalistic fMRI, decoding We then successfully predicted as-yet unseen actions, up to three actions into the future, based on their proximity to the current action’s coordinates in ACT-FAST space. We first use a decoding model to demonstrate that the brain uses ACT-FAST to represent current actions. To test this hypothesis, participants watched a video featuring naturalistic sequences of actions while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning. Within this space, the closer two actions are, the more likely they are to precede or follow each other. Specifically, we hypothesized that the brain represents perceived actions using a map that encodes which actions will occur next: the six-dimensional Abstraction, Creation, Tradition, Food(-relevance), Animacy and Spiritualism Taxonomy (ACT-FAST) action space. Here we used functional neuroimaging to test the hypothesis that people do both at the same time: when the brain perceives an action, it simultaneously encodes likely future actions. To interact with others successfully, we need to both understand their current actions and predict their future actions. People constantly walk, talk, eat, work, play, snooze and so on.
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