Anticipatory Semantic Processes

Why anticipatory processes correspond to cognitive abilities of living systems? To be adapted to an environment, behaviours need at least i) internal representations of events occurring in the external environment; and ii) internal anticipations of possible events to occur in- the external environment. Interactions of these two opposite but complementary cognitive properties lead to various patterns of experimental data on semantic processing. How to investigate dynamic semantic processes? Experimental studies in cognitive psychology offer several interests such as: i) the control of the semantic environment such as words embedded in sentences; ii) the methodological tools allowing the observation of anticipations and adapted oculomotor behaviour during reading; and iii) the analyse of different anticipatory processes within the theoretical framework of semantic processing. What are the different types of semantic anticipations? Experimental data show that semantic anticipatory processes involve i) the coding in memory of sequences of words occurring in textual environments; ii) the anticipation of possible future words from currently perceived words; and iii) the selection of anticipated words as a function of the sequences of perceived words, achieved by anticipatory activations and inhibitory selection processes. How to modelize anticipatory semantic processes? Localist or distributed neural networks models can account for some types of semantic processes, anticipatory or not. Attractor neural networks coding temporal sequences are presented as good candidate for modelling anticipatory semantic processes, according to specific properties of the human brain such as i) auto-associative memory; ii) learning and memorization of sequences of patterns; and iii) anticipation. of memorized patterns from previously perceived patterns.