Dr. Tom Froese

What is it like to use the Enactive Torch? The first systematic study of the experience of using this devise is going to come out soon in IEEE Transactions on Haptics. The title and abstract are as follows.

The Enactive Torch: A New Tool for the Science of Perception

Tom Froese, Marek McGann, William Bigge, Adam Spiers, and Anil K. Seth

The cognitive sciences are increasingly coming to terms with the embodied, embedded, extended, and experiential aspects of the mind. Exemplifying this shift, the enactive approach points to an essential role of goal-directed bodily activity in the generation of meaningful perceptual experience, i.e., sense-making. Here, building on recent insights into the transformative effects of practical tool-use, we make use of the enactive approach in order to provide a definition of an enactive interface in terms of augmented sense-making. We introduce such a custom-built interface, the Enactive Torch, and present a study of its experiential effects. The results demonstrate that the user experience is not adequately captured by any standardly assumed perceptual modality; rather, it is a new feeling that is mediated by the design of the device and shaped by the overall situation of the task. Taken together these findings show that there is much to be gained by synergies between engineering and the cognitive sciences in the creation of new experience-centered technology. We suggest that the guiding principle should be the design of interfaces that serve as a transparent medium for augmenting our natural skills of interaction with the world, instead of requiring conscious attention to the interface as an opaque object in the world.

My attempt to promote the methods and insights of evolutionary robotics in the field of human neuroscience has had its first success. A model of social interaction has been published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. This paper completes the main project of my JSPS fellowship.

Imitation by social interaction? Analysis of a minimal agent-based model of the correspondence problem

Tom Froese, Charles Lenay, and Takashi Ikegami

Abstract: One of the major challenges faced by explanations of imitation is the “correspondence problem”: how is an agent able to match its bodily expression to the observed bodily expression of another agent, especially when there is no possibility of external self-observation? Current theories only consider the possibility of an innate or acquired matching mechanism belonging to an isolated individual. In this paper we evaluate an alternative that situates the explanation of imitation in the inter-individual dynamics of the interaction process itself. We implemented a minimal model of two interacting agents based on a recent psychological study of imitative behavior during minimalist perceptual crossing. The agents cannot sense the configuration of their own body, and do not have access to other’s body configuration, either. And yet surprisingly they are still capable of converging on matching bodily configurations. Analysis revealed that the agents solved this version of the correspondence problem in terms of collective properties of the interaction process. Contrary to the assumption that such properties merely serve as external input or scaffolding for individual mechanisms, it was found that the behavioral dynamics were distributed across the model as a whole.

I’m happy to announce that my first publication in the field of archaeology and anthropology is now officially in press.

The paper is based on a talk I gave at Breaking Convention in Canterbury last year. It discusses possible links between the ritualization of non-ordinary states of consciousness and the cultural origins of the modern human mind.

Please click on the title to download the paper:

Altered States and the Prehistoric Ritualization of the Modern Human Mind.

In response to some GOFAI nostalgia published in the last issue of the AISB Quarterly, I wrote a short position paper outlining an alternative view of the situation. My response will be published in issue #134.

The contribution is called: Cognitive science is not computer science

The starting point for this paper was the realization that many of my colleagues who had been working in robotics and artificial life, had switched to doing experiments with human participants. Accordingly, I thought that it might be of general interest to explore some of the reasons for this shift.

Using Human–Computer Interfaces to Investigate ‘Mind-As-It-Could-Be’ from the First-Person Perspective

Tom Froese • Keisuke Suzuki • Yuta Ogai •Takashi Ikegami

There is a growing community of researchers who are interested in establishing a science of the experiential or ‘lived’ aspects of the human mind. This shift from cognitive science to consciousness science presents a profound challenge to synthetic approaches. To be sure, symbolic artificial intelligence constituted the original foundation of cognitive science; subsequent progress in robotics has helped to pioneer a new understanding of the mind as essentially embodied, situated, and dynamical, while artificial life has informed the concept of biological self-organization. However, with regard to the development of a science of the experienced mind, the relevance of these synthetic approaches still remains uncertain. We propose to address the challenge of first-person experience by designing new human–computer interfaces, which aim to artificially mediate a participant’s sensorimotor loop such that novel kinds of experience can emerge for the user. The advantage of this synthetic approach is that computer interface technology enables us to systematically vary the ways in which participants experience the world and thereby allows us to systematically investigate ‘mind-as-it-could-be’ from the first-person perspective. We illustrate the basic principles of this method by drawing on examples from our research in sensory substitution, virtual reality, and interactive installation.

The first results of my collaboration with Thomas Fuchs that started a couple of years have finally been published by Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences:

The extended body: a case study in the neurophenomenology of social interaction

Tom Froese & Thomas Fuchs

There is a growing realization in cognitive science that a theory of embodied intersubjectivity is needed to better account for social cognition. We highlight some challenges that must be addressed by attempts to interpret ‘simulation theory’ in terms of embodiment, and argue for an alternative approach that integrates phenomenology and dynamical systems theory in a mutually informing manner. Instead of ‘simulation’ we put forward the concept of the ‘extended body’, an enactive and phenomenological notion that emphasizes the socially mediated nature of embodiment. To illustrate the explanatory potential of this approach, we replicate an agent-based model of embodied social interaction. An analysis of the model demonstrates that the extended body can be explained in terms of mutual dynamical entanglement: inter-bodily resonance between individuals can give rise to self-sustaining interaction patterns that go beyond the behavioral capacities of isolated individuals by modulating their intra-bodily conditions of behavior generation.

The paper can be downloaded by clicking here.

I was invited to review the recently published edited book Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm of Cognitive Science. The resulting paper is now available in the journal Adaptive Behavior. The title and abstract are as follows:

From adaptive behavior to human cognition: a review of Enaction

Tom Froese
Ikegami Laboratory, University of Tokyo, Japan

Critics of the paradigm of enaction have long argued that enactive principles will be unable to account for the traditional domain of orthodox cognitive science, namely “higher-level” cognition and specifically human cognition. Moreover, even many of the paradigm’s “lower-level” insights into embodiment and situatedness appear to be amenable to a functionalist reinterpretation. In this review, I show on the basis of the recently published collection of papers, Enaction, that the paradigm of enaction has (a) a unique foundation in the notion of sense-making that places fundamental limits on the scope of functionalist appropriation; (b) a unique perspective on higher-level cognition that sets important new research directions without the need for the concept of mental representation; (c) a new concept of specifically human cognition in terms of second-order sense-making; and (d) a rich variety of approaches to explain the evolutionary, historical, and developmental origins of this sophisticated human ability. I also indicate how studies of the role of embodiment for abstract human cognition can strengthen their position by reconceiving their notion of embodiment in enactive terms.

You can download the paper here: PDF