behavioral-integration.
38 of 1538 NOTE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| NOTE-339 v2 | Examining the Society of Mind | An exposition, read in full. Singh dates the Society of Mind to Minsky and Papert’s early-1970s robot work, finds its agent in the procedure-bearing frame of 1974, and quotes the unpublished 1976 book drafts. He sorts the 1986 book’s mechanisms into agents, simplest agents, agency construction, problem solving, communication and growth. Agents need no shared code: K-lines, randomly wired buses and paranomes stand in for messages. He finds near-relatives in Bayes nets, case-based reasoning, blackboards, Cyc and Soar, and concludes that the theory has never been implemented. Its claims of lineage are asserted, not shown. | Read |
| NOTE-341 | The Computational Boundary of a “Self” | A hypothesis essay. A Self is the set of parts that pursue goals together, and its boundary is the farthest region of space and time it can measure and act on, its “cognitive light cone”. Selves grow from homeostatic loops by adding memory, anticipation and networks, and cells form larger Selves by sharing bioelectric state through gap junctions. Every level that has its own goal is a Self, so living systems hold many nested Selves at once; the paper says this against IIT in one bracket. It has no model, no measurement of the light cone and no new data, and it confines claims about experience to a closing speculation. | Read |
| NOTE-348 | The Emotion Machine | Read in the 2005 draft. Emotions are Ways to Think: each emotional state is a selection of mental resources turned on and off, made by Selectors that Critics trigger when they recognise a type of problem, and ordinary thinking uses the same switching. On this design sit six levels of mental activity, panalogies that link descriptions across realms, and a Self that is a network of partial models. It is argued by example and analogy, with no experiment and few neural claims. Against Damasio, the body is a resource the brain exploits, not what an emotion is made of; on Elliot it proposes, without evidence, the reverse causal direction. | Read |
| NOTE-351 | Intelligence without representation | A methodological manifesto with working robots behind it. Brooks argues that AI should build complete autonomous Creatures incrementally and test them in the real world, and that intelligence should be decomposed into parallel activity-producing layers, each running from sensing to action, not into perception, central reasoning and action. His robots have no central representation or control, and their coherence exists “in the eye of an observer”, as in Minsky’s account of human behaviour. The evidence is three layers on one robot, described, not measured, and the broad hypothesis about representation is flagged as a hypothesis. | Read |
| NOTE-429 | The Emerging Field of Emotion Regulation: An Integrative Review | Gross’s founding review. Emotions are modulable response tendencies. Regulation, defined as influencing which emotions one has, when, and how they are experienced and expressed, is split from coping, mood regulation and defense, and sorted into five families by where it acts in emotion generation: situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change, response modulation. The paper’s own open problem is whether regulation can be told apart from generation at all. | Read |
| NOTE-433 | Impulsive action: emotional impulses and their control | Frijda’s action-readiness theory applied to impulsive action. Automatic appraisal of concern pertinence elicits a state of action readiness, a motive to change a self–object relation, with control precedence. Emotions differ by mode of action readiness. Events draw several appraisals at once, and the resulting states of readiness interact, so impulse control and much emotion regulation are themselves emotional. Purposive impulsive action is grounded neurally in anticipating an action’s sensory effects (PPC, premotor, cerebellum), with frontostriatal circuits for stopping. | Read |
| NOTE-443 | Précis of Breakdown of Will | Hyperbolic discounting makes preference reverse with delay alone, so a person is a population of interests that forestall one another. Will is the recursive bundling of choices by treating each as a precedent, which gives an intertemporal repeated prisoner’s dilemma and makes Kavka’s toxin rational to drink. The same recursion predicts legalism, “lapse districts”, motivated misperception and compulsive over-control, and premature satiation of appetite limits what will can do for emotional reward. | Read |
| NOTE-445 | The Diffusion Decision Model: Theory and Data for Two-Choice Decision Tasks | The full diffusion model (drift v with across-trial SD η, boundaries 0 and a, starting point z with range s_z, non-decision time Ter with range s_t) fitted by the χ² quantile method. In three dot-motion experiments with 14–17 participants difficulty maps to drift alone, speed–accuracy instructions to boundaries alone, and a 75:25 proportion mainly to starting point; RT distribution shape is invariant across conditions. Drift variability gives slow errors and starting-point variability fast ones. Reviews aging, aphasia and neural-firing applications. | Read |
| NOTE-446 | The Expected Value of Control: An Integrative Theory of Anterior Cingulate Cortex Function | The paper proposes that dACC estimates the expected value of control: probability-weighted payoff of a control signal minus an intrinsic cost rising with its intensity. dACC uses that estimate to specify the identity and intensity of the control signal, which lPFC and subcortical structures (STN, LC) implement. The account unifies conflict monitoring, reward and prediction-error responses, effort costs and the override of defaults. It is a synthesis without a fitted model, and it leaves open how EVC is computed and what the cost function is. | Read |
| NOTE-449 | The Time Course of Perceptual Choice: The Leaky, Competing Accumulator Model | The LCA: dx_i = [ρ_i − k x_i − β Σ_{j≠i} x_j] dt/τ + ξ_i √(dt/τ), with x_i floored at 0. For two choices x₁ − x₂ is an OU process with K = k − β; d′(t) = d_asy (1 − e^{−Kt})/√(1 − e^{−2Kt}) and d_asy = (2v/σ)√(1/K). On new time–accuracy data the OU curve beats diffusion-with-drift-variance in 7 of 9 fits (combined likelihood ratio about 62). Leak versus inhibition predicts recency versus primacy; 2 of 6 participants favoured the end cluster and 2 opposed it. A fixed-accuracy criterion gives Hick’s law in all three models simulated, so it does not discriminate them. | Read |
| NOTE-451 | Hierarchically organized behavior and its neural foundations: A reinforcement learning perspective | The paper introduces hierarchical RL (options) to psychology and neuroscience as a response to RL’s scaling problem. An actor-critic options model learns faster with useful options (doorways in the rooms task) and slower or worse with unhelpful ones (windows; a shortcut ignored). It proposes DLPFC for option identity, DLS for option-specific policies, and OFC for option-specific values and option-level prediction errors. It predicts phasic dopamine at subtask boundaries and a possible neural pseudo-reward. Option discovery is named as the central problem. | Read |
| NOTE-452 | The Intimate Contest for Self-Command | Schelling’s essay proposes “egonomics”, the art of managing oneself. Its core claim is that many self-control tactics are the tactics for managing another person, applied to a “sometime self” who will be in command later. It gives a taxonomy of habits by time profile, onset time, warning time, cost, visibility, damage function and self-aggravation. It refuses a general answer to which self is authentic. It estimates the stakes at “on the order of a trillion dollars” for the current population. | Read |
| NOTE-453 | Evolution of the Internal Family Systems Model | Schwartz’s short statement of the IFS model. A person is “an ecology of relatively discrete minds”, parts forced into managerial, exiled or firefighting roles by experience, which can return to valuable roles. At the core is a Self with leadership qualities (the eight Cs), reached when parts “step back”, as in the founding case of “Diane”. The Self is an active healer, not a witness. A practitioner’s essay; its evidence is clinical experience. | Read |
| NOTE-454 | Sophisticated Inference | Expected free energy evaluated recursively over the beliefs an agent would hold after each plausible outcome turns active inference into a pruned tree search over belief states, formally analogous to Bellman recursion. Small simulations show it planning through short-term costs (an aversive cue; a maze barrier needing horizon four) and exploring by novelty. Its scalability is argued from pruning, not demonstrated; its first-principles grounding is cited, not developed. | Read |
| NOTE-457 | Internal Family Systems Therapy | Chapter 1 only. Schwartz tells how IFS grew out of structural and strategic family therapy. Clients with bulimia described warring “parts”. Coercing parts made matters worse, and curiosity revealed that they protected the client. When interfering parts were asked to “step back”, a calm, compassionate “Self” appeared that needed no development. The chapter ends with eight essentials: ecological respect for protectors, Self-leadership, unblending, attention to polarizations, non-pathologizing burdens, movement between system levels, and innate self-healing. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-459 | Uncertainty-based competition between prefrontal and dorsolateral striatal systems for behavioral control | Habit and goal-directed action are model-free (cached values) and model-based (tree search) reinforcement learners, arbitrated by which controller’s Bayesian posterior over action value has the lower variance. Over-training shifts control to the cache because tree search accrues computational noise per step. Task complexity and proximity to reward keep the tree in control. It also predicts that incentive learning should become unnecessary when the caching system is lesioned. | Read |
| NOTE-461 | The Physics of Optimal Decision Making: A Formal Analysis of Models of Performance in Two-Alternative Forced-Choice Tasks | Proves the pure DDM is the continuum limit of the SPRT and so the optimal two-choice decider. The linearised Usher–McClelland model decouples into a difference process, an O-U with λ = w − k, and a stable sum process, so it reduces to the DDM when k = w and both are large; feedforward inhibition does so at u = 1, pooled inhibition with fast inhibitory units, the race model never. The reward-rate-optimal threshold is unique and depends only on the total delay, giving a parameter-free optimal performance curve (peak decision time about 0.2 of the delay at ER about 18%). | Read |
| NOTE-462 | An Accumulator Model for Spontaneous Neural Activity Prior to Self-Initiated Movement | A three-parameter leaky stochastic accumulator, δx = (I − kx)Δt + cξ√Δt, fitted to Libet-task waiting times (k = 0.5, I = 0.11, threshold at the 80th percentile of output), reproduces the readiness potential (r² = 0.96) and the linear mean–SD relation of waiting times (r = 0.9). In a variant with random clicks, fast responders showed a slow negativity before the click (P < 0.005), and fast and slow clicks were spread equally through the trial (P = 0.64). The neural decision to move is placed at the threshold crossing about 150 ms before movement. | Read |
| NOTE-463 | Model-based and model-free Pavlovian reward learning: Revaluation, revision, and revelation | The paper argues that Pavlovian prediction has a model-based form. A cue that predicted disgusting salt was instantly “wanted” in a novel salt appetite, before retasting, with mesolimbic activation. That needs identity-specific prediction revalued by current state, which no model-free cache provides. It proposes “defocusing” of the predicted outcome as a model-based source of apparent habit. It argues dopamine can carry model-based evaluations. A kappa-transformation model fits the data but is described as phenomenological, and no algorithm is offered. | Read |
| NOTE-464 | A Planning Agent’s Self-Governance over Time | Bratman’s model of a planning agent’s self-governance over time. It needs (1) planned temporally extended activity with a time-frame to “plan’s end”, (2) synchronic self-governance along the way, (3) cross-temporal links of intention that are intrapersonal analogues of shared intention, so the agent acts “together” with herself, and (4) “diachronicalized” standpoints holding a conditional, reflexive end of diachronic self-governance. The model makes some willpower and resistance to shuffling self-governed and excludes the toxin case. Argued by cases, not tested. | Read |
| NOTE-466 | HDDM: Hierarchical Bayesian Estimation of the Drift-Diffusion Model in Python | HDDM fits the full DDM (v, a, z, t with sv, st, sz) by MCMC in PyMC, with group-level priors such as μ_a ~ Gamma(1.5, 0.75), μ_v ~ N(2, 3), z_j ~ invlogit(N(μ_z, σ_z²)), and the Navarro–Fuss likelihood. A patsy-style regressor lets a parameter vary with a trial covariate. In simulations with 12 subjects and 20–150 trials, hierarchical Bayes had the lowest trimmed recovery error for every parameter and the highest power to detect drift differences and covariate effects, by up to 20% for the latter with larger effects and few trials. | Read |
| NOTE-467 | The Haken–Kelso–Bunz (HKB) model: from matter to movement to mind | Kelso’s retrospective on HKB. The relative-phase equation dφ/dt = −a sin φ − 2b sin 2φ has stable in-phase and anti-phase states for b/a > 1/4 and only in-phase below; with noise the switch is a nonequilibrium phase transition with critical fluctuations and slowing. Symmetry breaking gives metastability (relative coordination); merged with Kuramoto it models groups. The same dynamics is reported within and between people and in brain activity. A first-person account, not a review. | Read |
| NOTE-826 | Turvey — Preliminaries to a theory of action | An essay, not a study. The executive cannot command muscles one by one, so acts are built from relatively autonomous coordinative structures, reflexes and their functional combinations, a term Turvey takes from Easton (1972). Higher levels specify equivalence classes of acceptable states and tune the parameters of these units, like the stiffness and rest length of a spring. The spinal cord is shown, by reflex probes, to be retuned before a voluntary movement, and optical information may set the tuning directly. | Read |
| NOTE-851 | Ashby — Design for a Brain | Adaptation is the stability of the organism–environment system in the region where the essential variables stay within limits. To find such stability in an unknown environment, a second feedback must change the parameters of the first whenever an essential variable leaves its limits: the ultrastable system, shown in the Homeostat. Its blind search takes time exponential in the number of variables unless partial adaptations are kept, and keeping them needs a system that is not fully joined, its parts separated by constancies. New learning destroys old to the degree that it uses the same parts. | Read |
| NOTE-954 | Powers, Clark & McFarland — General Feedback Theory, Part I | Builds a hierarchy of negative-feedback control systems in which each order perceives only the feedback signals of the order below and acts only by setting their references, which are replayed recordings of their own past perceptions. An “imagination connection” sends those references back into the higher system’s perception, so that it can remember, plan “mentally”, hallucinate and dream, under a “mixing control” the authors cannot specify (“We are open to suggestions”, p. 20). An inherited N-system, driven by error in intrinsic physiological variables, reorganizes the network at random, forming new input functions as well as new outputs; an organization persists when the behaviour it produces lessens intrinsic error. | Read |
| NOTE-959 | Powers, Clark & McFarland — General Feedback Theory, Part II | Names six orders of perception, from spinal loops through sensations, configurations, sequences and relationships to system concepts, with demonstrations whose reaction times lengthen with order (about 0.3 s at third order, 0.4–0.45 s at fourth). The N-system “merely alters the properties of a system, thus changing the transformations applied to existing information” (p. 37): reorganization is a change of perception, felt as insight, and a new perceptual organization can be vetoed by imagining its use. Consciousness is defined as a feedback function under N-system action. Conflict freezes a lower system at a virtual reference, and a system switched “entirely to the imagination-connection” is one of the ego’s defences. | Read |
| NOTE-963 | Powers — Feedback: Beyond Behaviorism | A control system “will produce whatever output is required in order to achieve a constant sensed result” (p. 77), so behaviour is the control of input, not output, and stimulus-response laws follow from the environment once the controlled quantity is found. Above the lowest level a system’s output is a reference level for the level below, so the hierarchy closes through lower systems down to muscle effort sensed kinesthetically; its top is a set of inherited intrinsic reference levels whose error drives reorganization. The paper says nothing about imagination: every loop it describes closes through the environment. | Read |
| NOTE-1102 | Control Theory, Goal Attainment, and Psychopathology | A commentary. Control theory adds to goal talk the need to perceive the present state and compare it with the goal. Psychopathology arises where the loop’s input, reference value, comparison or output is extreme or biased. The five factors are sensitivities to classes of goals. Valence tracks the velocity of goal attainment against a reference value, so approach and avoidance can each produce either sign. Confidence, doubt and disengagement lie outside the loop, in expectancy-value theory. | Read |
| NOTE-1111 | Hesp et al. — Deeply felt affect: the emergence of valence in deep active inference | A computational proof of principle with no data. Valence is a state of self, inferred at a slower, deeper level from affective charge, the update to the expected precision γ that sets how far the preference- driven action model, rather than habit, governs policy selection. Positive charge is rising confidence in the action model and negative charge falling confidence. The valence level sends priors on γ back down. “Felt” means explicitly represented, which the authors take as necessary, not sufficient, for self-reportable valence. For the record, this is the closest existing model of that felt valence is the system modelling its own potential. But its sign and intensity run against the record’s potential account for negative valence, and it inherits the wanting/liking problem. | Read |
| NOTE-1124 | Gollwitzer & Sheeran — Implementation intentions and goal achievement: a meta-analysis | A meta-analysis of 94 tests (1990–2003, 8,461 participants, mostly students and laboratory tasks) finds that adding an if-then plan to a goal intention raised goal attainment by d = .65 against the goal intention alone, across four problems of goal striving, with large effects on cue accessibility and on the immediacy, efficiency and non-conscious running of the planned response in small sets of tests (k = 1 to 7). Plans are said to delegate control “to specified situational cues” while staying dependent on an active goal. Publication bias was checked only by comparing published with unpublished tests; the 2024 meta-analysis of 642 tests finds it substantial. | Read |
| NOTE-1131 v2 | Sheeran, Listrom & Gollwitzer — The when and how of planning: 642 tests of implementation intentions | A meta-analysis of 642 tests (294 reports to September 2019). Forming implementation intentions improved behaviour (d = .27), cognitive performance (.47), affect regulation (.66) and social judgement (.52), pooled d = .36; publication bias was substantial, and a robust Bayesian estimate is d = .15, small and highly heterogeneous. Contingent if-then plans beat schedule plans (.43 against .29); rehearsing the plan once helped, recording it hurt, and effects were large only when motivation was high. A taxonomy of cues and responses finds nearly every kind effective. | Read |
| NOTE-1353 v2 | Guida, Minutola and Presti — Propagation, not aggregation | A conceptual paper with no data. Organizational flexibility is put as a pattern of coordinated, values-consistent action that is retained and spread or absorbed and extinguished, not as the mean of members’ flexibility. Whether a rise in a member’s flexibility propagates is said to depend jointly on that member’s leverage over the consequences colleagues meet and on whether the culture reinforces or penalizes values-consistent action; Bond’s (2018) leader-based route is the high-leverage special case. Five propositions, a factorial design and two measures that do not yet exist are set out. | Read |
| NOTE-1411 | Seeley et al. — Stop signals provide cross inhibition in honeybee swarms | Nest-site scouts of honeybee swarms deliver stop signals, head-butts with a brief vibration, to scouts dancing for sites other than their own while the swarm is choosing (213 of 237 signals in two two-box swarms), and to all dancers once it has chosen. An ODE model, in the supplement, shows that above a critical rate of such cross inhibition a swarm facing two equal sites breaks deadlock and picks one at random, and picks the better when they differ enough. | Read |
| NOTE-1424 | Haken, Kelso & Bunz — A theoretical model of phase transitions in human hand movements | A theory paper. It takes relative phase as the order parameter of bimanual rhythmic movement and models the switch from anti-phase to in-phase at a critical frequency with φ̇ = −∂V/∂φ, V = −a cos φ − b cos 2φ, anti-phase being lost when |b| < |a|/4. It derives that equation from two self-sustained oscillators whose coupling must be nonlinear, and shows the switch and hysteresis in one simulation. The data it models are Kelso’s earlier experiments, summarized, and critical fluctuations and slowing are left to future work. | Read |
| NOTE-1425 | Morrison, Madden, Odum, Friedel & Twohig — Altering impulsive decision making | Thirty undergraduates who discounted steeply were randomized to one 60–90 minute acceptance-and-values session or a waitlist. A week later the trained group discounted hypothetical money less (interaction p = .04), while the AAQ-II and distress tolerance did not change relative to control. Pooling pre- and post-training data, discounting (d = .57) and distress tolerance improved and the AAQ-II approached significance. The waitlist group’s own post-training change in discounting was not significant. | Read |
| NOTE-1433 | Kelso, Scholz & Schöner — Critical fluctuations | As bimanual wrist or finger movement is paced faster, the standard deviation of relative phase grows as the anti-phase pattern nears its switch to in-phase, peaks in the transition (about 85° mean phase, near the 90° of a uniform spread), and falls once in-phase is reached; started in-phase, the same movement shows neither a switch nor that growth. The authors take this as critical fluctuations, a mark of a nonequilibrium phase transition. Critical slowing is predicted, not measured, and the evidence is shown for a few subjects without a test. | Read |
| NOTE-1440 | Rung & Madden — Experimental reductions of delay discounting | A systematic review and category-wise meta-analysis of 92 papers that tried to lower delay discounting without drugs or lesions. Most kinds of manipulation worked, learning-based ones such as bundling and delay fading best. Clinical interventions moved discounting little, and mindfulness and ACT, two studies, only at trend level (g = 0.32, p = .06). Mediation was almost never tested, so how any manipulation lowers discounting is unknown. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1449 | Kelso, Scholz & Schöner — Dynamics governs switching | Four people switched on cue between in-phase and anti-phase finger movement. Going from in-phase to anti-phase took about twice as long as the reverse at every frequency tested, with a longer-tailed distribution, significant for each subject. A stochastic HKB equation with the earlier experiments’ parameters plus a term pulling relative phase toward the intended pattern reproduces the asymmetry and the shapes, with one parameter set to the right order of magnitude: the less stable a pattern, the faster it is left. Loss of stability before spontaneous switches is cited, not shown. | Read |