Tom Froese

On the 11th of October I will give a short presentation at the First Conference of the EUCogII network in Hamburg, Germany. The title and abstract are as follows:

Evolutionary Robotics Meets Social Psychology

Tom Froese and Ezequiel Di Paolo

Evolutionary robotics has become a popular engineering method for the synthesis of complex robotic systems. But how can we make it more relevant to the natural sciences? Here we propose to address this challenge by means of an integrative methodology which links evolutionary robotics with empirical research in terms of hypothesis generation and verification. To illustrate this proposal we report on a number of recent modelling experiments which have specifically targeted studies in social psychology. In particular, it is demonstrated how it is possible for the dynamics of a social interaction process to extend the behavioural domain of the individual agents. We argue on the basis of these results that sociality is a promising contender to bridge the ‘cognitive gap’ between minimal and human cognition, a fundamental problem which continues to be faced by bottom-up approaches such as embodied cognitive science.

On the 14th of September I will give a talk at the European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL 2009) in Budapest, Hungary. The title and abstract of the presentation are as follows:

Toward Minimally Social Behavior: Social Psychology Meets Evolutionary Robotics

Tom Froese and Ezequiel A. Di Paolo

We report on a set of minimalist modeling experiments that extends previous work on the dynamics of social interaction. We used an evolutionary robotics approach to fine-tune the design of a recent psychological experiment, as well as to synthesize a solution that gives clues about how humans might perform under these novel conditions. In this manner we were able to generate a number of hypotheses that are open to verification by future experiments in social psychology. In particular, the results indicate some of the advantages and disadvantages of relying on social factors for solving behavioral tasks.

You can download the full paper from here.

This Wednesday I will give a Life and Mind seminar at 4:30pm in Arun-401. Title and abstract below:

Sociality and the life-mind continuity thesis: An exploration in evolutionary robotics

Tom Froese

Time: 4:30-6:00pm
Date: Wed. 2nd, September 2009
Location: Arun-401, University of Sussex, UK

In this seminar I will provide a brief summary of my PhD. The main idea is the following:

The life-mind continuity thesis, which is the theoretical foundation for recent embodied, enactive and dynamical approaches to cognitive science, holds that mind is prefigured in life and that mind belongs to life. Its biggest challenge is the problem of scalability: how can the same explanatory framework that accounts for basic phenomena of life and mind be extended to incorporate the highest reaches of human cognition? So far there has been little systematic response to this apparent ‘cognitive gap’.

The aim of my PhD is to show that the scalability problem appears insurmountable because of the prevalent focus on the individual agent alone, and that the problem can be resolved by an appreciation of the constitutive role of sociality. In the seminar I will present a series of evolutionary robotics models that support this argument.

All welcome!

This is my abstract for this year’s Ratna Ling conference on first-person methods.

Artificial Embodiment: An integrative methodology for a science of consciousness

Even today, 40 years after Bach-y-Rita’s seminal Nature paper on a tactile-visual sensory substitution (TVSS) system, no consensus can be reached on how best to interpret users’ verbal reports. Is the experience of using such sensory augmentation interfaces visual, tactile, cognitive, or something altogether new? The growing fascination with technological wizardry, i.e. the building of different and more advanced interfaces, is in itself unlikely to resolve such a foundational issue.

The lack of a principled methodology to make progress on this impasse can naturally be linked to another growing debate in the cognitive sciences, namely about the role of first- or second-person approaches for the scientific study of consciousness. The development and establishment of these approaches is encountering some difficulty in the face of a widespread skepticism inherited from the behaviorist tradition. In order for them to demonstrate their methodological validity it is especially important that they go beyond mere data collection, i.e. descriptions of experiential phenomena, and move into a more productive relationship with the rest of cognitive science.

Accordingly, we propose to address the distinct difficulties faced by phenomenological methodology and sensory augmentation research by relating these two growing areas of research in a mutually beneficial manner. The crucial step of moving beyond mere technological wizardry or data collection into a principled scientific research program is to link them together in terms of hypothesis generation and verification. We refer to this novel research program as Artificial Embodiment (AE). The basic methodology consists of four essential steps:
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