Palmer Colin J, Seth Anil K, Hohwy Jakob
Cognition and Philosophy Lab, Philosophy Department, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia.
Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, School of Engineering and Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QJ, UK.
Conscious Cogn. 2015 Nov;36:376-89. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2015.04.007. Epub 2015 Apr 28.
The mental states of other people are components of the external world that modulate the activity of our sensory epithelia. Recent probabilistic frameworks that cast perception as unconscious inference on the external causes of sensory input can thus be expanded to enfold the brain's representation of others' mental states. This paper examines this subject in the context of the debate concerning the extent to which we have perceptual awareness of other minds. In particular, we suggest that the notion of perceptual presence helps to refine this debate: are others' mental states experienced as veridical qualities of the perceptual world around us? This experiential aspect of social cognition may be central to conditions such as autism spectrum disorder, where representations of others' mental states seem to be selectively compromised. Importantly, recent work ties perceptual presence to the counterfactual predictions of hierarchical generative models that are suggested to perform unconscious inference in the brain. This enables a characterisation of mental state representations in terms of their associated counterfactual predictions, allowing a distinction between spontaneous and explicit forms of mentalising within the framework of predictive processing. This leads to a hypothesis that social cognition in autism spectrum disorder is characterised by a diminished set of counterfactual predictions and the reduced perceptual presence of others' mental states.
他人的心理状态是外部世界的组成部分，它们会调节我们感觉上皮的活动。因此，最近将感知视为对感觉输入的外部原因进行无意识推理的概率框架可以扩展，以纳入大脑对他人心理状态的表征。本文在关于我们对他人心理有多大程度的感知意识的辩论背景下探讨了这个主题。特别是，我们认为感知呈现的概念有助于细化这场辩论：他人的心理状态是否被体验为我们周围感知世界的真实特质？社会认知的这一体验方面可能是自闭症谱系障碍等病症的核心，在这些病症中，他人心理状态的表征似乎受到了选择性损害。重要的是，最近的研究将感知呈现与分层生成模型的反事实预测联系起来，这些模型被认为在大脑中执行无意识推理。这使得能够根据其相关的反事实预测来表征心理状态，从而在预测处理框架内区分自发和明确的心理化形式。这就引出了一个假设，即自闭症谱系障碍中的社会认知的特点是反事实预测减少，以及他人心理状态的感知呈现减少。
