Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Pervasive behavioral and neural evidence for predictiveprocessing has led to claims that language processing dependsupon predictive coding. In some cases, this may reflect aconflation of terms, but predictive coding formally is acomputational mechanism where only deviations from top-down expectations are passed between levels of representation.We evaluate three models’ ability to simulate predictiveprocessing and ask whether they exhibit the putative hallmarkof formal predictive coding (reduced signal when inputmatches expectations). Of crucial interest, TRACE, aninteractive activation model that does not explicitly implementprediction, exhibits both predictive processing and model-internal signal reduction. This may indicate that interactiveactivation is functionally equivalent or approximant topredictive coding, or that caution is warranted in interpretingneural signal reduction as diagnostic of predictive coding.