ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2015
Knowing one's place: a free-energy approach to pattern regulation.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 93 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
93 citing papers in PubMed, 238 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Beyond representations: from active inference to active interference.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- The Morphological, Behavioral, and Transcriptomic Life Cycle of Anthrobots.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- The Multiscale Wisdom of the Body: Collective Intelligence as a Tractable Interface for Next-Generation Biomedicine.BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology · 2025Review
- As One and Many: Relating Individual and Emergent Group-Level Generative Models in Active Inference.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Uncertainty minimization and pattern recognition inJournal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Body as First Teacher: The Role of Rhythmic Visceral Dynamics in Early Cognitive Development.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Article
- Stress sharing as cognitive glue for collective intelligences: A computational model of stress as a coordinator for morphogenesis.Biochemical and biophysical research communications · 2024Article
- Cortical development in the structural model and free energy minimization.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- Forced Friends: Why the Free Energy Principle Is Not the New Hamilton's Principle.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Active Inference for Learning and Development in Embodied Neuromorphic Agents.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- The energetics of cellular life transitions.Life metabolism · 2024Article
- Self-Improvising Memory: A Perspective on Memories as Agential, Dynamically Reinterpreting Cognitive Glue.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Markov Blankets and Mirror Symmetries-Free Energy Minimization and Mesocortical Anatomy.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Embryos assist morphogenesis of others through calcium and ATP signaling mechanisms in collective teratogen resistance.Nature communications · 2024Article
- The police hunch: the Bayesian brain, active inference, and the free energy principle in action.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Disgust as a primary emotional system and its clinical relevance.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Bioelectric networks: the cognitive glue enabling evolutionary scaling from physiology to mind.Animal cognition · 2023Review
- Article
33 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Understanding how organisms establish their form during embryogenesis and regeneration represents a major knowledge gap in biological pattern formation. It has been recently suggested that morphogenesis could be understood in terms of cellular information processing and the ability of cell groups to model shape. Here, we offer a proof of principle that self-assembly is an emergent property of cells that share a common (genetic and epigenetic) model of organismal form. This behaviour is formulated in terms of variational free-energy minimization-of the sort that has been used to explain action and perception in neuroscience. In brief, casting the minimization of thermodynamic free energy in terms of variational free energy allows one to interpret (the dynamics of) a system as inferring the causes of its inputs-and acting to resolve uncertainty about those causes. This novel perspective on the coordination of migration and differentiation of cells suggests an interpretation of genetic codes as parametrizing a generative model-predicting the signals sensed by cells in the target morphology-and epigenetic processes as the subsequent inversion of that model. This theoretical formulation may complement bottom-up strategies-that currently focus on molecular pathways-with (constructivist) top-down approaches that have proved themselves in neuroscience and cybernetics.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.