Beyond Individuals: Collective Predictive Coding for Memory, Attention, and the Emergence of Language
It offers a new perspective on group-level cognition and language emergence, but is a hypothetical commentary without empirical validation.
The paper tackles the problem of extending memory and attention concepts from individual to collective cognitive systems, proposing the Collective Predictive Coding hypothesis to explain the emergence of language as a group-level external representation.
This commentary extends the discussion by Parr et al. on memory and attention beyond individual cognitive systems. From the perspective of the Collective Predictive Coding (CPC) hypothesis -- a framework for understanding these faculties and the emergence of language at the group level -- we introduce a hypothetical idea: that language, with its embedded distributional semantics, serves as a collectively formed external representation. CPC generalises the concepts of individual memory and attention to the collective level. This offers a new perspective on how shared linguistic structures, which may embrace collective world models learned through next-word prediction, emerge from and shape group-level cognition.