Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Distributed cognition and decision making has been a topic ofintense research in the recent years. In this paper, a computa-tional model of distributed decision making using a commu-nity of predictive coding agents is developed. The agents areembodied multimodal entities and situated in a shared envi-ronment. They have different visibility of the environment dueto unique sensory and generative models. We show that com-munication between agents helps each of them reach a shareddecision in a way that cannot be reached by brain processes ina single agent. Using a simulated environment, we show thatsensory limitations may lead to incorrect or delayed causal in-ferences giving rise to conflicts in the mind of a predictive cod-ing agent, and communication helps to resolve such conflictsand overcome the limitations.