Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

According to theories of event-predictive cognition, neural processing focuses on the next relevant interaction targets. Evidence for this notion comes from the anticipatory crossmodal congruency effect (aCCE), which implies that spatial body representations are mapped onto future goal locations in advance of a goal-directed action. Here we present a free energy based normative process model that accounts for the aCCE quantitatively by applying crossmodal mappings between vision and touch as well as active inference. A comparison with a diffusion model shows that our model accounts for the response time distributions and the aCCE with a sparser set of parameters. However, the temporal dynamics of the model require further fine tuning to account for all aspects of the aCCE. The model shows how the free energy framework can be used to account for behavioral data in general and how to implement theories of event-predictive cognition in a normative cognitive process model.