Sander Van de Cruys

Sander Van de Cruys
University of Antwerp | UA

Doctor of Psychology

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50
Publications
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1,937
Citations

Publications

Publications (50)
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The motto of the conspiracist, “Do your own research,” may seem ludicrous to scientists. Indeed, it is often dismissed as a mere rhetorical device that conspiracists use to give themselves the semblance of science. In this perspective paper, we explore the information-seeking activities (“research”) that conspiracists do engage in. Drawing on the e...
Preprint
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More than 40 years ago, pioneering social psychologist Robert Zajonc (1980) published his seminal work titled “Preferences need no inferences” in which he argued for the primacy of affect over cognition. Affective evaluation (the preference) comes first, he claimed, and only then do cognitive processes (the inferences) kick in. The view is untenabl...
Article
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Current theories propose that our sense of curiosity is determined by the learning progress or information gain that our cognitive system expects to make. However, few studies have explicitly tried to quantify subjective information gain and link it to measures of curiosity. Here, we asked people to report their curiosity about the intrinsically en...
Article
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We applaud the efforts by Stark and colleagues [1] to chart how a predictive processing account of autism may lead to autistic anxiety. We wholeheartedly agree that this is a productive route to shed light on a real problem in autism and that this kind of dialogue is much needed in a field that has been plagued by dogged misconceptions, with someti...
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Categorization is an essential cognitive and perceptual process, which happens spontaneously. However, earlier research often neglected the spontaneous nature of this process by mainly adopting explicit tasks in behavioural or neuroimaging paradigms. Here, we use frequency-tagging (FT) during electroencephalography (EEG) in 22 healthy human partici...
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In the last few years, a remarkable convergence of interests and results has emerged between scholars interested in the arts and aesthetics from a variety of perspectives and cognitive scientists studying the mind and brain within the predictive processing (PP) framework. This convergence has so far proven fruitful for both sides: while PP is incre...
Article
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How to account for the power that art holds over us? Why do artworks touch us deeply, consoling, transforming or invigorating us in the process? In this paper, we argue that an answer to this question might emerge from a fecund framework in cognitive science known as predictive processing (a.k.a. active inference). We unpack how this approach conne...
Article
Communicating about new or unknown health risks is challenging because it requires audiences to engage with and process novel and often complex health information. This study examines how texts can convey awareness and increase knowledge about health risks people are unaware of. The focus is on how text genre (narrative, expository, and mixed-genre...
Article
Full-text available
The motto of the conspiracist, “Do your own research,” may seem ludicrous to scientists. Indeed, it is often dismissed as a mere rhetorical device that conspiracists use to give themselves the semblance of science. In this perspective paper, we explore the information-seeking activities (“research”) that conspiracists do engage in. Drawing on the e...
Article
Full-text available
We review the predictive processing theory’s take on goals and affect, to shed new light on mental distress and how it develops into psychopathology such as in affective and motivational disorders. This analysis recovers many of the classical factors known to be important in those disorders, like uncertainty and control, but integrates them in a me...
Article
The determinants of affect proposed by the appraisal theory, the goal-directed theory, and the predictive processing theory are compared. The first theory attaches a role to multiple factors (goal-related factors, expectation-related factors, and control), the second theory only focuses on goal-related factors, and the third theory only focuses on...
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Bayesian predictive coding theories of autism spectrum disorder propose that impaired acquisition or a broader shape of prior probability distributions lies at the core of the condition. However, we still know very little about how probability distributions are learned and encoded by children, let alone children with autism. Here, we take advantage...
Article
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Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) presents a challenge to social and relational accounts of the self, precisely because it is broadly seen as a disorder impacting social relationships. Many influential theories argue that social deficits and impairments of the self are the core problems in ASC. Predictive processing approaches address these based on...
Article
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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. Those implications lead us to move beyond meme-centered or an organism-centered concepts of fitness based on free energy minimization, towards a social systems-centered v...
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We examine whether a stimulus generalization framework can provide insight in how experience shapes evaluative responses to artworks. Participants received positive information about one artwork and negative information about another artwork. Afterwards, we tested their evaluative responses not only to these artworks but also to similar artworks, w...
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Ward’s signal detection theory-based framework elucidates some aspects of interindividual differences in sensitivity, but, we argue, obscures others. Specifically, it disregards the important challenge of inferring the meaning of sensory inputs. Within Bayesian predictive coding accounts, the meaning is given by inferences to more deeply hidden cau...
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One recent, promising account of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) situates the cause of the disorder in an atypicality in basic neural information processing, more specifically in how activity of one neuron is modulated by neighboring neurons. The canonical neural computation that implements such contextual influence is called divisive (or suppressi...
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In dit artikel geven we een toegankelijk overzicht van recent ontwikkelde ideeën over hoe mensen met autisme op een andere manier informatie verwerken en omgaan met onzekerheid, gebaseerd op de theorie van het brein-als-voorspeller. Zoals Sherlock het plot van een moord opbouwt om de geobserveerde sporen te verklaren en nieuwe sporen te voorspellen...
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A recently proposed model of sensory processing suggests that perceptual experience is updated in discrete steps. We show that the data advanced to support discrete perception are in fact compatible with a continuous account of perception. Physiological and psychophysical constraints, moreover, as well as our awake-primate imaging data, imply that...
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Background: Recent predictive coding accounts of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) suggest that a key deficit in ASD concerns the inflexibility in modulating local prediction errors as a function of global top-down expectations. As a direct test of this central hypothesis, we used electroencephalography to investigate whether local prediction error pr...
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We use the example of art-derived solace to discuss a broader mechanism by which negative affect is instrumental in creating positive appreciation of artworks. Based on the theory of predictive processing, we argue that increasing attunement or reduction of prediction errors, which implies increasing validation of the agent(‘s models), is experienc...
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An amorphous collection of black and white patches (so-called Mooney images) can be perceived dramatically differently before versus after exposure to the natural source image. Prior experience causes the patches to (re)organize and fit together in a meaningful whole. Given recent hypotheses on a weaker role of priors in perception in individuals w...
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We explored the strength of implicit social inferences in adolescents with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) using a chasing paradigm in which participants judged the absence/presence of a chase within a display of four seemingly randomly moving dots. While two of these dots always moved randomly, the two others could fulfill the role of b...
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A large body of research reports individual differences in local and global visual processing in relation to expertise, culture and psychopathology. However, recent research has suggested that various different measures of local-global processing are not strongly associated with one another, calling its construct validity into question. The current...
Chapter
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Although affective value is fundamental in explanations of behavior, it is still a somewhat alien concept in cognitive science. It implies a normativity or directionality that mere information processing models cannot seem to provide. In this paper we trace how affective value can emerge from information processing in the brain, as described by pre...
Article
A daily rhythm that is not in synchrony with the environmental light–dark cycle (as in jetlag and shift work) is known to affect mood and health through an as yet unresolved neural mechanism. Here, we combine Bayesian probabilistic 'cue-conflict' theory with known physiology of the biological clock of the brain, entailing the insight that, for a fu...
Article
Predictive coding has recently been welcomed as a fruitful framework to understand autism spectrum disorder. Starting from an account centered on deficient differential weighting of prediction errors (based in so-called precision estimation), we illustrate that individuals with autism have particular difficulties with separating signal from noise,...
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In many magic tricks, magicians fool their audience by performing a mock action (a socalled "ruse"), which merely serves the purpose of providing a seemingly natural explanation for visible movements that are actually part of the secret move they want to hide from the audience. Here, we discuss a special magic ruse in which the action of secretly p...
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There have been numerous attempts to explain the enigma of autism, but existing neurocognitive theories often provide merely a refined description of 1 cluster of symptoms. Here we argue that deficits in executive functioning, theory of mind, and central coherence can all be understood as the consequence of a core deficit in the flexibility with wh...
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Pellicano and Burr (2012) argue that a Bayesian framework can help us understand the perceptual peculiarities in autism. We agree, but we think that their assumption of uniformly flat or equivocal priors in autism is not empirically supported. Moreover, we argue that any full account has to take into consideration not only the nature of priors in a...
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The predictive coding model is increasingly and fruitfully used to explain a wide range of findings in perception. Here we discuss the potential of this model in explaining the mechanisms underlying aesthetic experiences. Traditionally art appreciation has been associated with concepts such as harmony, perceptual fluency, and the so-called good Ges...
Article
Full-text available
The predictive coding model is increasingly and fruitfully used to explain a wide range of findings in perception. Here we discuss the potential of this model in explaining the mechanisms underlying aesthetic experiences. Traditionally art appreciation has been associated with concepts such as harmony, perceptual fluency, and the so-called good Ges...
Article
Full-text available
Our aim with this paper is to demonstrate that the predictive coding framework, currently gaining support in cognitive neuroscience, can capture and elucidate important insights from Gestalt theory. Additionally, we illustrate how this approach could address a recurrent issue in the Gestalt tradition, namely aesthetic appreciation of visual art. At...

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