Does anyone know about Helmholtz machines, or similar, and would be open to me asking a couple of questions?
I do experimental cognitive psychology and they're outside my expertise, and I think my questions are the type that are hard to answer through reading individual papers myself but should be simple for someone who is familiar with the higher level assumptions and norms of the field.
Thanks!
My paper on adaptation after-effects in autistic and non-autistic teenagers is out in Autism Research! 
"Autistic and nonautistic adolescents do not differ in adaptation to gaze direction"
These autistic teens show a large adaptation after-effect behaviourally, though we don't see the after-effects in EEG, and we try to interpret this in light of Predictive Processing accounts of autism.
Very excited to share this preprint I wrote with Danaja Rutar, @LorijnZ , @francescopoli & Sabine Hunnius.
We first introduce #PredictiveProcessing and define its terms with *lots* of examples, and then point out that it cannot yet account for
#development
PP claims to be a unifying account of #cognition , and as such should apply to all humans.
We propose two additions which are necessary not only for completeness of PP,
but also for #devsci to be able to use it.
“The Dress was a really interesting case. Suddenly people realized there’s a lot of hidden variety in perceptual experience.… I think #PredictiveProcessing is going to ultimately give us something like a periodic table of experiential variation: all the neurotypical and the atypical cases and everything that lies in between, and all the variety within typical and atypical.”—from my #NautilusMagazine interview with #AndyClark https://nautil.us/reality-is-your-brains-best-guess-312269/
I was exposed to the importance of interaction between top-down and bottom-up neural/cognitive processes early on (I did my PhD in the department Steve Grossberg started), so I am slightly amused and baffled by the hype surrounding #PredictiveProcessing and/or #ActiveInference.
It suggests that David Hume's idea that all knowledge comes from the outside world has had way too long a half-life in biology.
Here's a short blogpost on our latest paper on #predictiveprocessing in Synthese: https://ifispan.pl/en/testable-or-bust-theoretical-lessons-for-predictive-processing/ (see https://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11229-022-03891-9 – #openaccess)
Following our previous approach establishing that #anxiety increases behavioral ritualization, we now show that #ritualization may help decrease anxiety, albeit only for participants more susceptible to anxiety induction.
