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| Chloë FitzGerald |
This month, Chloë FitzGerald introduces chapter 9 of Jakob Hohwy's The Predictive Mind (OUP, 2013). Chloë is postdoctoral Fellow on the project Understanding Implicit Bias in Clinical Care at iEH2 (institut Ethique Histoire Humanités), Centre Médical Universitaire, Université de Genève.
Chapter 9 - Precision, Attention and Consciousness
Presented by Chloë FitzGerald
In Chapter 9, Hohwy describes how the PEM framework can be used to explain the functional role of attention and to illuminate the relation of attention to conscious perception. He claims that the PEM theory of attention is the best explanation we currently have of attention.
Hohwy’s account follows Karl Friston and colleagues’ proposal that ‘attention is just optimization of precisions in hierarchical prediction error minimization’ (p. 194). The sensory signals received by the brain vary in how reliable they are and this variability needs to be gauged to enable perceptual inferences to work well. This is why expected precisions are important for PEM. Howry explains that the brain needs to select where to put in most effort in prediction error minimization and that this effort should be spent where the prediction error signals are expected to be most precise. Attention thus ‘requires learning state-dependent patterns of noise and precision and then using such prior beliefs to set the gain on prediction error’ (p. 195).
