ArticleCognitive science2020
Unification by Fiat: Arrested Development of Predictive Processing.
Article in Cognitive science, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Conceptual blending in humans and language models.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- The myth of the Bayesian brain.European journal of applied physiology · 2025Review
- A new predictive coding model for a more comprehensive account of delusions.The lancet. Psychiatry · 2024Review
- Cellular mechanisms of cooperative context-sensitive predictive inference.Current research in neurobiology · 2024Review
- Information-theoretic analyses of neural data to minimize the effect of researchers' assumptions in predictive coding studies.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- How childhood maltreatment alters perception and cognition - the predictive processing account of borderline personality disorder.Psychological medicine · 2022Review
- The promise of layer-specific neuroimaging for testing predictive coding theories of psychosis.Schizophrenia research · 2022Review
- An Enactive-Ecological Model to Guide Patient-Centered Osteopathic Care.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- The overfitted brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization.Patterns (New York, N.Y.) · 2021Review
- Cognition Without Neural Representation: Dynamics of a Complex System.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Building and Understanding the Minimal Self.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Bayesian theories of consciousness: a review in search for a minimal unifying model.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2021Review
- Pragmatic Prediction in the Processing of Referring Expressions Containing Scalar Quantifiers.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Predictive processing (PP) has been repeatedly presented as a unificatory account of perception, action, and cognition. In this paper, we argue that this is premature: As a unifying theory, PP fails to deliver general, simple, homogeneous, and systematic explanations. By examining its current trajectory of development, we conclude that PP remains only loosely connected both to its computational framework and to its hypothetical biological underpinnings, which makes its fundamentals unclear. Instead of offering explanations that refer to the same set of principles, we observe systematic equivocations in PP-based models, or outright contradictions with its avowed principles. To make matters worse, PP-based models are seldom empirically validated, and they are frequently offered as mere just-so stories. The large number of PP-based models is thus not evidence of theoretical progress in unifying perception, action, and cognition. On the contrary, we maintain that the gap between theory and its biological and computational bases contributes to the arrested development of PP as a unificatory theory. Thus, we urge the defenders of PP to focus on its critical problems instead of offering mere re-descriptions of known phenomena, and to validate their models against possible alternative explanations that stem from different theoretical assumptions. Otherwise, PP will ultimately fail as a unified theory of cognition.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.