nucleation

LIT-957: Relative fluency (unfelt vs felt) in active inference

2 min read

Properties5
StatusActive — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-785) in full; worth reading as a short statement of how fluency research could be put into active inference: fluency as the recognition of the precision of one's own predictions, registered first as a change against expectation and misattributed to the stimulus because its cause is internal. Read it knowing that it is a perspective essay with no model and no new data, that its experiments are reviewed second-hand, and that its "felt" fluency means fluency made reportable by endogenous attention, not a separation of experience from function.
Version2
Tagsemotion-and-affect, consciousness, cognition
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-785 — Brouillet and Friston — Relative fluency (unfelt vs felt) in active inference
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-662 — The feeling of fluency is an inference about the precision of one's own processing, triggered by a change in precision against expectation; because its cause is internal and not given to introspection, a felt discrepancy is attributed to the most salient external source, as familiarity, liking or a sense of error

Graph View

Denis Brouillet and Karl Friston (2023), Consciousness and Cognition 115: 103579.

Key takeaways

From the reading, NOTE-785.

  • Relative, not absolute, fluency drives judgement. After Whittlesea, what matters is ease against expectation. In the hension effect, new pronounceable non-words draw more false recognitions than real words that are read faster.
  • Misattribution. A discrepancy in fluency is surprising, its source is not introspectable, and it is attributed to the most salient candidate: the stimulus, a past study list, a typing error.
  • Fluency as precision. The proposal is that fluency is the recognition of the precision of one’s predictions, which active inference equates with attention.
  • Unfelt and felt. Unfelt fluency is a “non-conscient” recognition of a change in attentional set, likened to exogenous attention. Felt fluency is a “hierarchically deeper representation”, made opaque by mental action, that is, endogenous attention.
  • Cause and consequence. Felt fluency sets priors on lower-level precision and is revised by a “prediction error of prediction errors”.
  • No model, no new data. The formal claims lean on cited simulations of attention and meta-awareness; the experiments are reviewed briefly, many from the first author’s laboratory.

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-12 from the owner’s papers-feed for QUESTION-059, as a separation of felt from unfelt fluency and “a candidate mechanism for what feeling adds to a functional state”. Read on 2026-10-14 in NOTE-785, which does not bear that out. Fluency here is a metacognitive feeling of ease, not affect, and “felt” means made reportable by endogenous attention: a higher functional position, not something added to function. The paper is at most one more instance of the identity side of QUESTION-059, alongside Veit (THEORY-101), and its felt states are about the brain’s own processing rather than the body, which sets it beside, not against, THEORY-045. No THEORY was filed: its own contribution is a proposal without a model, and its empirical base is second-hand.

Backlinks