Attending to the Body Action and Self-Experience in the Active Inference Framework

Endogenous attention is crucial and beneficial for learning, selecting, and supervising actions. However, deliberately attending to action execution usually comes with costs like decreased smoothness and slower performance; it may severely impair normal functioning and, in the worst case, result in pathological behavior and self-experience. These ambiguous modulatory effects of attention to action have been examined on phenomenological, computational, and implementational levels of description. The active inference framework offers a novel and potentially unifying view on these aspects, proposing that actions are enabled by attentional modulation based on expected precision of prediction errors in a brain’s hierarchical generative model. The implications of active inference fit well with empirical results, they resonate well with ideomotor action theories, and they also tentatively reflect many insights from phenomenological analysis of the “lived body”. A particular strength of active inference is its hierarchical account of motor control in terms of adaptive behavior driven by the imperative to maintain the organism’s states within unsurprising boundaries. Phenomena ranging from movement production by spinal reflex arcs to intentional, goal-directed action and the experience of oneself as an embodied agent are thus proposed to rely on the same mechanisms operating universally throughout the brain’s hierarchical generative model. However, while the explanation of movement production and sensory attenuation in terms of low-level attentional modulation is quite elegant on the active inference view, there are some questions left open by its extension to higher levels of action control—particularly about the accompanying phenomenology. I suggest that conceptual guidance from recent accounts of phenomenal selfand world-modeling may help refine the active inference framework, leading to a better understanding of the predictive nature of embodied agentive self-experience. Keywords