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arXiv · 2508.15859

Beyond Individuals: Collective Predictive Coding for Memory, Attention, and the Emergence of Language

Tadahiro Taniguchi
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Abstract

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.

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Tadahiro Taniguchi. 2025-08-20. Beyond Individuals: Collective Predictive Coding for Memory, Attention, and the Emergence of Language. https://doi.org/10.1080/17588928.2025.2518942

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