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.

Last Thursday I passed my D.Phil. viva with minor corrections!

Many thanks to my examiners Phil Husbands and Mike Wheeler for grilling me for a couple of hours of intense discussions.

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!

The final drafts of all of the upcoming papers are now available for download as PDFs from here.

The Enactive AI paper I wrote with Tom Ziemke, which has just been published in March, is #1 of ScienceDirect’s Top 25 Hottest Articles in Artificial Intelligence for the period January – March 2009!

As a result of the work I did for my D.Phil. thesis on “Sociality and the life-mind continuity thesis: A study in evolutionary robotics” a batch of publications related to sociality will be published in the coming months:

- Froese, T. & Di Paolo, E. A. (forthcoming), “Sociality and the life-mind continuity thesis”, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
- Froese, T. & Di Paolo, E. A. (forthcoming), “Modeling social interaction as perceptual crossing: An investigation into the dynamics of the interaction process”, Connection Science
- De Jaegher, H. & Froese, T. (forthcoming), “On the role of social interaction in individual agency”, Adaptive Behavior
- Froese, T. & Di Paolo, E. A. (forthcoming), “Toward Minimally Social Behavior: Social Psychology Meets Evolutionary Robotics”, in: Proc. of the 10th Euro. Conf. on Artificial Life, Berlin, Germany: Springer Verlag

And, of course, I have not neglected my interested in the phenomenon of life:

- Virgo, N., Egbert, M. & Froese, T. (forthcoming), “The Role of the Spatial Boundary in Autopoiesis”, in: Proc. of the 10th Euro. Conf. on Artificial Life, Berlin, Germany: Springer Verlag

I’ve also taken this as an opportunity to update the website a little bit. In particular, the Publications page is now sub-divided into different categories of papers, and I’ve created a new Presentations page that lists the talks, posters, and seminars separately. This means that the Academic CV page is now much less cluttered.

I will post separate announcements for the papers as they become available.

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:

(i) Synthesis of interfaces: The experiential phenomena of interest are not naturally occurring and need to be artificially induced by technological means. Here it is possible to draw on the work that has already been going on in research into enactive interfaces and sensory augmentation.

(ii) Emergence of experience: The experiential phenomena of interest emerge out of the ongoing interactions of a human subject with the world, as mediated by the interface designed in step (i).

(iii) Analysis of first-person perspective: The experiential phenomena that emerge in step (ii) are essentially opaque, especially if the subject is not an expert in becoming aware of experiences and describing them. In other words, experiences are typically in need of being explicitated by means of second-person interview techniques, and then require further analysis.

(iv) Generation of hypotheses: The insights gained in step (iii) form the empirical basis for verifying the original motivating hypothesis for the study. They also inform the process of generating novel hypotheses, which then become the basis for the design of novel interfaces in step (i).

It is step (iv) which crucially turns these disparate elements into a coherent scientific research program. Indeed, any serious study should ideally traverse this methodological circle at least twice: Once to generate a novel hypothesis, and then once more to verify the validity of this hypothesis.

So far there exists no scientific study which has systematically followed the AE research program as outlined above. One topic that is generating growing interest in the cognitive sciences is the role of value for the embodied mind. Accordingly, we propose to use AE as a framework for investigating the phenomenon of situated normativity, i.e. the values associated with instinctive or unreflective embodied action. Such values are a good starting point because they are an essential aspect of phenomenal feel, as well as of affective behavior, and thus provide us with the basis for correlating subjective and objective data. A study with haptic interfaces (distance-to-touch) has indicated that subjects show aversive behavior with minimal priming (“avoid objects”) and no knowledge of the interface. Can we explain this normative reaction in terms of the phenomenology of the subjects?

It’s been a while since I’ve posted an update, so here it goes. Last week I finally handed in my thesis with the title “Sociality and the life-mind continuity thesis: A study in evolutionary robotics”. The day after I traveled to Berlin for the Coma and Consciousness: Clinical, Societal and Ethical Implications workshop, a general meeting by the COST action on consciousness, and the annual conference of the Association for Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC-13). There is no doubt that the field of consciousness studies is buzzing indeed!

Tomorrow I’m leaving for the annual Ratna Ling conference on first-person approaches to consciousness studies in California, where I will be presenting a talk on what I have called “Artificial Embodiment”, an integrative methodology which combines first-person methods and minimalist enactive interfaces by means of hypothesis generation and verification. I’ll make a separate post for the talk’s abstract.

Here is the title and extended abstract (or position paper) for the talk which I will be giving at the Workshop on Key Issues in Sensory Augmentation later this month.

Exploring Mind-As-It-Could-Be: From Artificial Life to Artificial Embodiment

Tom Froese
March 26, 2009

How should we investigate the qualitative aspects of being a living, cognitive and conscious agent? I want to argue that we are in the middle of another technologically-inspired development, one which can systematically complement the methodology of AL in this particular respect. I propose to call this emerging field Artificial Embodiment.

Under the label of Artificial Embodiment (AE) I understand a methodology that enables us to go beyond the study of embodiment-as-we-know-it, in order to access the domain of embodiment-as-it-could-be. More precisely, by building on the assumptions that the mind is embodied, and that by systematically changing our embodiment we can systematically change our experiential states, the aim of AE is to access a larger domain of mental phenomena, i.e. mind-as-it-could-be, so as to ground general theories of cognitive science and, of course, reap some technological benefits along the way.

Read the full position paper here.