Moralesbean6015

Discoveries about social learning and culture in non-human animals have burgeoned this century, yet despite aspiring to offer a unified account of culture, the target article neglects these discoveries almost totally. I offer an overview of principal findings in this field including phylogenetic reach, intraspecies pervasiveness, stability, fidelity, and attentional funnelling in social learning. Can the authors' approach accommodate these?The target article does not address the neural mediation of complex social behavior. I review evidence that such mediation may be compatible with proposed Bayesian information-processing principles. Notably, however, such mediation occurs subcortically as well as cortically, concerns reward uncertainty and information uncertainty, and impacts culture via group-level payoff structures that define individualism and collectivism.Emerging cybertechnologies, such as social digibots, bend epistemological conventions of life and culture already complicated by human and animal relationships. Virtually-augmented niches of machines and organic life promise new free-energy-governed selection of intelligent digital life. These provocative eco-evolutionary contexts demand a theory of (natural and artificial) minds to characterize and validate the immersive social phenomena universally-shaping cultural affordances.We consider the ways humans engage in social epistemic actions, to guide each other's attention, prediction, and learning processes towards salient information, at the timescale of online social interaction and joint action. This parallels the active guidance of other's attention, prediction, and learning processes at the longer timescale of niche construction and cultural practices, as discussed in the target article.The target article "Thinking Through Other Minds" (TTOM) offered an account of the distinctively human capacity to acquire cultural knowledge, norms, and practices. To this end, we leveraged recent ideas from theoretical neurobiology to understand the human mind in social and cultural contexts. Our aim was both synthetic - building an integrative model adequate to account for key features of cultural learning and adaptation; and prescriptive - showing how the tools developed to explain brain dynamics can be applied to the emergence of social and cultural ecologies of mind. In this reply to commentators, we address key issues, including (1) refining the concept of culture to show how TTOM and the free-energy principle (FEP) can capture essential elements of human adaptation and functioning; (2) addressing cognition as an embodied, enactive, affective process involving cultural affordances; (3) clarifying the significance of the FEP formalism related to entropy minimization, Bayesian inference, Markov blankets, and enactivist views; (4) developing empirical tests and applications of the TTOM model; (5) incorporating cultural diversity and context at the level of intra-cultural variation, individual differences, and the transition to digital niches; and (6) considering some implications for psychiatry. The commentators' critiques and suggestions point to useful refinements and applications of the model. In ongoing collaborations, we are exploring how to augment the theory with affective valence, take into account individual differences and historicity, and apply the model to specific domains including epistemic bias.Thinking through other minds creatively situates the free-energy principle within real-life cultural processes, thereby enriching both sociocultural theories and Bayesian accounts of cognition. Here, shifting the attention from thinking-through to becoming-with, we suggest complementing such an account by focusing on the empirical, computational, and conceptual investigation of the multiscale dynamics of social interaction.We show that TTOM has a lot to offer for the study of the evolution of cultures, but that this also brings to the fore the dark implications of TTOM, unexposed in Veissière et al. Cell Cycle inhibitor Those implications lead us to move beyond meme-centered or an organism-centered concept of fitness based on free-energy minimization, toward a social system-centered view.There are serious theoretical problems with the free-energy principle model, which are shown in the current article. We discuss the proposed model's inability to account for culturally emergent normativities, and point out the foundational issues that we claim this inability stems from.The Bayesian brain hypothesis, as formalized by the free-energy principle, is ascendant in cognitive science. But, how does the Bayesian brain obtain prior beliefs? Veissière and colleagues argue that sociocultural interaction is one important source. We offer a complementary model in which "interoceptive self-inference" guides the estimation of expected uncertainty both in ourselves and in our social conspecifics.In areas endemic for Leishmania infantum, an asymptomatic infection may be an indicator of the extent of transmission. The main goal of this study was to evaluate the applicability of measuring circulating immunological biomarkers as an alternative strategy to characterize and monitor L. infantum asymptomatic infections in combination with serological methods. To this end, 179 children from a region endemic for visceral leishmaniasis (VL), aged 1-10 years old, selected from a cross-sectional study, were identified as asymptomatic (n = 81) or uninfected (n = 98) by qPCR and/or serological tests (ELISA using L. infantum soluble antigen and rK39), and, together with serum samples of children diagnosed with VL (n = 43), were subjected to avidity tests and cytokine levels measurement. Avidity rates (AR) ranging from 41 to 70% were found in 29 children (66%) from the asymptomatic group. On the other hand, high AR (above 70%) were observed in 27 children (64%) from the VL group. Logistic Regression and Classification and Regression Tree (CART) analyses demonstrated that lower AR and IFN-γ production associated with higher IL-17A levels were hallmarks in asymptomatic L. infantum infections. Therefore, this study proposes an association of immunological biomarkers that can be used as a complementary strategy for the characterization and monitoring of asymptomatic VL infections in children living in endemic areas.