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Tom Froese

Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Embodied Cognitive Science Unit, Faculty Member

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Coordinator of the Embodied Cognitive Science Unit. See our website at: https://groups.oist.jp/ecsu
Address: 1919-1 Tancha, Onna-son, Okinawa 904-0495, Japan

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Articles by Tom Froese

Irruption and Absorption: A 'Black-Box' Framework for How Mind and Matter Make a Difference to Each Other

Entropy, 2024

Cognitive science is confronted by several fundamental anomalies deriving from the mind–body prob... more Cognitive science is confronted by several fundamental anomalies deriving from the mind–body problem. Most prominent is the problem of mental causation and the hard problem of consciousness, which can be generalized into the hard problem of agential efficacy and the hard problem of mental content. Here, it is proposed to accept these explanatory gaps at face value and to take them as positive indications of a complex relation: mind and matter are one, but they are not the same. They are related in an efficacious yet non-reducible, non-observable, and even non-intelligible
manner. Natural science is well equipped to handle the effects of non-observables, and so the mind is treated as equivalent to a hidden ‘black box’ coupled to the body. Two concepts are introduced given that there are two directions of coupling influence: (1) irruption denotes the unobservable mind
hiddenly making a difference to observable matter, and (2) absorption denotes observable matter hiddenly making a difference to the unobservable mind. The concepts of irruption and absorption are methodologically compatible with existing information-theoretic approaches to neuroscience, such as measuring cognitive activity and subjective qualia in terms of entropy and compression, respectively. By offering novel responses to otherwise intractable theoretical problems from first principles, and by
doing so in a way that is closely connected with empirical advances, irruption theory is poised to set the agenda for the future of the mind sciences.

Making mind matter with irruption theory: Bridging end-directedness and entropy production by satisfying the participation criterion

A central ambition of an expanded theoretical biology is to provide an account of how both physio... more A central ambition of an expanded theoretical biology is to provide an account of how both physiology and agency, and each in their own irreducible way, contribute to the generation of adaptive behavior. To ensure that the semiotic, communicative, representational, or meaning-bearing aspects of agency make a measurable difference to behavior generation, we introduce a test for candidate theories, the “participation criterion”: End-directedness of a behavior entails that, in principle, it is distinguishable by measurement from one without end-directedness. Two promising theories of the thermodynamic basis of end-directedness, namely Swenson’s “law of maximum entropy production (LMEP)” and Deacon’s “autogen” model, fall short arguably by construction. We then appeal to the realist and non-reductive “irruption theory” of agency as a compelling way forward. We speculate that end-directedness will show up in measurement as a local increase in unpredictability of physiological dynamics, which has the global effect of stochastically nudging the organism to the end state. Accordingly, irruption theory satisfies the participation criterion by predicting an end-directedness-dependent acceleration of the rate of entropy production. This prediction is consistent with existing research into the association between neural fluctuations and task behavior, is open to further experimental verification, and provides a novel perspective on the sources of entropy production in the organism.

The pragmatics, embodiment, and efficacy of lived experience: Assessing the core tenets of Varela's neurophenomenology

Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2023

Varela's enactive approach to cognitive science has been elaborated into a theoretical framework ... more Varela's enactive approach to cognitive science has been elaborated into a theoretical framework of agency, sense-making, and sociality, while his key methodological innovationneurophenomenology (NP)-continues to inspire empirical work. We argue that the enactive approach was originally expressed in NP as three core tenets: (1) phenomenological pragmatics, (2) embodied cognition, and (3) conscious efficacy. However, most efforts in NP have focused on applying tenet 1, while tenet 2 has received notably less attention, and there is even explicit distancing from tenet 3. By way of a critical review of four case studies, we show how NP thereby falls short of its full potential. Crucially, it needs to demonstrate that the first-person perspective matters, not only as a source of correlations with third-person data, but because lived experience, as such, makes a difference in its own right to the living body's dynamics. Given that methods for improving subjective reports have become accepted in human neuroscience (tenet 1), and given the increasing availability for recording multiscalar organismic activity during embodied action (tenet 2), we propose it is time to integrate these research strands by using this issue of conscious efficacy as a pivot point (tenet 3). The development of genuinely experience-involving accounts of neurophysiological activity during embodied action holds promise for rebooting neurophenomenology in stronger form.

Irruption Theory: A Novel Conceptualization of the Enactive Account of Motivated Activity

Entropy, 2023

Cognitive science is lacking conceptual tools to describe how an agent’s motivations, as such, ca... more Cognitive science is lacking conceptual tools to describe how an agent’s motivations, as such, can play a role in the generation of its behavior. The enactive approach has made progress by developing a relaxed naturalism, and by placing normativity at the core of life and mind; all cognitive activity is a kind of motivated activity. It has rejected representational architectures, especially their reification of the role of normativity into localized “value” functions, in favor of accounts that appeal to system-level properties of the organism. However, these accounts push the problem of reification to a higher level of description, given that the efficacy of agent-level normativity is completely identified with the efficacy of non-normative system-level activity, while assuming operational equivalency. To allow normativity to have its own efficacy, a new kind of nonreductive theory is proposed: irruption theory. The concept of irruption is introduced to indirectly operationalize an agent’s motivated involvement in its activity, specifically in terms of a corresponding underdetermination of its states by their material basis. This implies that irruptions are associated with increased unpredictability of (neuro)physiological activity, and they should, hence, be quantifiable in terms of information-theoretic entropy. Accordingly, evidence that action, cognition, and consciousness are linked to higher levels of neural entropy can be interpreted as indicating higher levels of motivated agential involvement. Counterintuitively, irruptions do not stand in contrast to adaptive behavior. Rather, as indicated by artificial life models of complex adaptive systems, bursts of arbitrary changes in neural activity can facilitate the self-organization of adaptivity. Irruption theory therefore, makes it intelligible how an agent’s motivations, as such, can make effective differences to their behavior, without requiring the agent to be able to directly control their body’s neurophysiological processes.

Scientific Observation Is Socio-Materially Augmented Perception: Toward a Participatory Realism

Philosophies, 2022

There is an overlooked similarity between three classic accounts of the conditions of object expe... more There is an overlooked similarity between three classic accounts of the conditions of object experience from three distinct disciplines. (1) Sociology: the “inversion” that accompanies discovery in the natural sciences, as local causes of effects are reattributed to an observed object. (2) Psychology: the “externalization” that accompanies mastery of a visual–tactile sensory substitution interface, as tactile sensations of the proximal interface are transformed into vision-like experience of a distal object. (3) Biology: the “projection” that brings forth an animal’s Umwelt, as impressions on its body’s sensory surfaces are reconfigured into perception of an external object. This similarity between the effects of scientific practice and interface-use on the one hand, and of sensorimotor interaction on the other, becomes intelligible once we accept that skillful engagement with instruments and interfaces constitutes a socio-material augmentation of our basic perceptual capacity. This enactive interpretation stands in contrast to anti-realism about science associated with constructivist interpretations of these three phenomena, which are motivated by viewing them as the internal mental construction of the experienced object. Instead, it favors a participatory realism: the sensorimotor basis of perceptual experience loops not only through our body, but also through the external world. This allows us to conceive of object experience in relational terms, i.e., as one or more subjects directly engaging with the world. Consequently, we can appreciate scientific observation in its full complexity: it is a socio-materially augmented process of becoming acquainted with the observed object that—like tool-use and perceiving more generally—is irreducibly self, other-, and world-involving.

The Pandemic Experience: A Corpus of Subjective Reports on Life During the First Wave of COVID-19 in the UK, Japan, and Mexico

by Tom Froese, Jamila Rodrigues, and Havi Carel

Frontiers in Public Health, 2021

Historical archives show us that past pandemics were relatively poorly documented, but this time ... more Historical archives show us that past pandemics were relatively poorly documented, but this time around there are widespread efforts to keep a detailed record. Our main concern, as a multidisciplinary team spanning psychology, philosophy, psychiatry, medicine, and anthropology, is that this record also includes a detailed account of how people experienced the pandemic from their own first-person perspective. We therefore decided to publicly release a cross-cultural corpus of subjective reports of the first wave of COVID-19.

Shrunken Social Brains? A Minimal Model of the Role of Social Interaction in Neural Complexity

Frontiers in NeuroRobotics, 2021

The social brain hypothesis proposes that enlarged brains have evolved in response to the increas... more The social brain hypothesis proposes that enlarged brains have evolved in response to the increasing cognitive demands that complex social life in larger groups places on primates and other mammals. However, this reasoning can be challenged by evidence that brain size has decreased in the evolutionary transitions from solitary to social larger groups in the case of Neolithic humans and some eusocial insects. Different hypotheses can be identified in the literature to explain this reduction in brain size. We evaluate some of them from the perspective of recent approaches to cognitive science, which support the idea that the basis of cognition can span over brain, body, and environment. Here we show through a minimal cognitive model using an evolutionary robotics methodology that the neural complexity, in terms of neural entropy and degrees of freedom of neural activity, of smaller-brained agents evolved in social interaction is comparable to the neural complexity of larger-brained agents evolved in solitary conditions. The nonlinear time series analysis of agents' neural activity reveals that the decoupled smaller neural network is intrinsically lower dimensional than the decoupled larger neural network. However, when smaller-brained agents are interacting, their actual neural complexity goes beyond its intrinsic limits achieving results comparable to those obtained by larger-brained solitary agents. This suggests that the smaller-brained agents are able to enhance their neural complexity through social interaction, thereby offsetting the reduced brain size.

The Effects of Daytime Psilocybin Administration on Sleep: Implications for Antidepressant Action

Frontiers in Pharmacology, 2020

Serotonergic agonist psilocybin is a psychedelic with antidepressant potential. Sleep may interac... more Serotonergic agonist psilocybin is a psychedelic with antidepressant potential. Sleep may interact with psilocybin's antidepressant properties like other antidepressant drugs via induction of neuroplasticity. The main aim of the study was to evaluate the effect of psilocybin on sleep architecture on the night after psilocybin administration. Regarding the potential antidepressant properties, we hypothesized that psilocybin, similar to other classical antidepressants, would reduce rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and prolong REM sleep latency. Moreover, we also hypothesized that psilocybin would promote slow-wave activity (SWA) expression in the first sleep cycle, a marker of sleep-related neuroplasticity. Twenty healthy volunteers (10 women, age 28-53) underwent two drug administration sessions, psilocybin or placebo, in a randomized, double-blinded design. Changes in sleep macrostructure, SWA during the first sleep cycle, whole night EEG spectral power across frequencies in non-rapid eye movement (NREM) and REM sleep, and changes in subjective sleep measures were analyzed. The results revealed prolonged REM sleep latency after psilocybin administration and a trend toward a decrease in overall REM sleep duration. No changes in NREM sleep were observed. Psilocybin did not affect EEG power spectra in NREM or REM sleep when examined across the whole night. However, psilocybin suppressed SWA in the first sleep cycle. No evidence was found for sleep-related neuroplasticity, however, a different dosage, timing, effect on homeostatic regulation of sleep, or other mechanisms related to antidepressant effects may play a role. Overall, this study suggests that potential antidepressant properties of psilocybin might be related to changes in sleep.

The Feeling Is Mutual: Clarity of Haptics-Mediated Social Perception Is Not Associated With the Recognition of the Other, Only With Recognition of Each Other

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2020

The enactive theory of perception hypothesizes that perceptual access to objects depends on the m... more The enactive theory of perception hypothesizes that perceptual access to objects depends on the mastery of sensorimotor contingencies, that is, on the know-how of the regular ways in which changes in sensations depend on changes in movements. This hypothesis can be extended into the social domain: perception of other minds is constituted by mastery of self-other contingencies, that is, by the know-how of the regular ways in which changes in others' movements depend on changes in one's movements. We investigated this proposal using the perceptual crossing paradigm, in which pairs of players are required to locate each other in an invisible one-dimensional virtual space by using a minimal haptic interface. We recorded and analyzed the real-time embodied social interaction of 10 pairs of adult participants. The results reveal a process of implicit perceptual learning: on average, clarity of perceiving the other's presence increased over trials and then stabilized. However, a clearer perception of the other was not associated with correctness of recognition as such, but with both players correctly recognizing each other. Furthermore, the moments of correct mutual recognition tended to happen within seconds. The fact that changes in social experience can only be explained by the successful performance at the level of the dyad, and that this veridical mutual perception tends toward synchronization, lead us to hypothesize that integration of neural activity across both players played a role.

What binds us? Inter-brain neural synchronization and its implications for theories of human consciousness

Neuroscience of Consciousness, 2020

The association between neural oscillations and functional integration is widely recognized in th... more The association between neural oscillations and functional integration is widely recognized in the study of human cogni-tion. Large-scale synchronization of neural activity has also been proposed as the neural basis of consciousness. Intriguingly, a growing number of studies in social cognitive neuroscience reveal that phase synchronization similarly appears across brains during meaningful social interaction. Moreover, this inter-brain synchronization has been associated with subjective reports of social connectedness, engagement, and cooperativeness, as well as experiences of social cohesion and 'self-other merging'. These findings challenge the standard view of human consciousness as essentially first-person singular and private. We therefore revisit the recent controversy over the possibility of extended consciousness and argue that evidence of inter-brain synchronization in the fastest frequency bands overcomes the hitherto most convincing sceptical position. If this proposal is on the right track, our understanding of human consciousness would be profoundly transformed , and we propose a method to test this proposal experimentally.

Where Is the Action in Perception? An Exploratory Study With a Haptic Sensory Substitution Device

Frontiers in Psychology, 2020

Enactive cognitive science (ECS) and ecological psychology (EP) agree that active movement is imp... more Enactive cognitive science (ECS) and ecological psychology (EP) agree that active movement is important for perception, but they remain ambiguous regarding the precise role of agency. EP has focused on the notion of sensorimotor invariants, according to which bodily movements play an instrumental role in perception. ECS has focused on the notion of sensorimotor contingencies, which goes beyond an instrumental role because skillfully regulated movements are claimed to play a constitutive role. We refer to these two hypotheses as instrumental agency and constitutive agency, respectively. Evidence comes from a variety of fields, including neural, behavioral, and phenomenological research, but so far with confounds that prevent an experimental distinction between these hypotheses. Here we advance the debate by proposing a novel double-participant setup that aims to isolate agency as the key variable that distinguishes bodily movement in active and passive conditions of perception. We pilot this setup with a psychological study of width discrimination using the Enactive Torch, a haptic sensory substitution device. There was no evidence favoring the stronger hypothesis of constitutive agency over instrumental agency. However, we caution that during debriefing several participants reported using cognitive strategies that did not rely on spatial perception. We conclude that this approach is a viable direction for future research, but that greater care is required to establish and confirm the desired modality of first-person experience.

Unsupervised learning facilitates neural coordination across the functional clusters of the C. elegans connectome

by Tom Froese and Alejandro Morales-Huitron

Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 2020

Modeling of complex adaptive systems has revealed a still poorly understood benefit of unsupervis... more Modeling of complex adaptive systems has revealed a still poorly understood benefit of unsupervised learning: when neural networks are enabled to form an associative memory of a large set of their own attractor configurations, they begin to reorganize their connectivity in a direction that minimizes the coordination constraints posed by the initial network architecture. This self-optimization process has been replicated in various neural network formalisms, but it is still unclear whether it can be applied to biologically more realistic network topologies and scaled up to larger networks. Here we continue our efforts to respond to these challenges by demonstrating the process on the connectome of the widely studied nematode worm C. elegans. We extend our previous work by considering the contributions made by hierarchical partitions of the connectome that form functional clusters, and we explore possible beneficial effects of inter-cluster inhibitory connections. We conclude that the self-optimization process can be applied to neural network topologies characterized by greater biological realism, and that long-range inhibitory connections can facilitate the generalization capacity of the process.

A Mural of Psychoactive Thorn Apples (Datura spp.) in the Ancient Urban Center of Teotihuacan, Central Mexico

Economic Botany, 2020

Most of the little we know about the use of psychoactive plants in pre-Hispanic Mexico comes from... more Most of the little we know about the use of psychoactive plants in pre-Hispanic Mexico comes from post-contact sources, and from the occasional archaeological artefact that is suggestive of cultural continuity into the deeper past (Nesvig 2017). One of the most prominent genera in this context is Datura, which has significant implications for many indigenous cultures and remains widespread in traditional medicine. We know from accounts produced from the early 16th century onwards that the Aztecs considered several species sacred. However, it is unclear how much deeper into the pre-Hispanic past this role extends, because the prehistoric roots of Datura use are poorly understood throughout the Americas, and archaeobotanical evidence is scant (Rafferty 2018). Here it is proposed that botanical motifs in mural paintings of ancient Teotihuacan represent Datura thorn apples. This extends cultural continuity back to this urban center, which was at its height from about 150 to 550 CE (Cowgill 2015), and thus preceded the Aztec empire by a millennium.

How passive is passive listening? Toward a sensorimotor theory of auditory perception

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences

According to sensorimotor theory perceiving is a bodily skill involving exercise of an implicit k... more According to sensorimotor theory perceiving is a bodily skill involving exercise of an implicit know-how of the systematic ways that sensations change as a result of potential movements, that is, of sensorimotor contingencies. The theory has been most successfully applied to vision and touch, while perceptual modalities that rely less on overt exploration of the environment have not received as much attention. In addition, most research has focused on philosophically grounding the theory and on psychologically elucidating sensorimotor laws, but the theory's ramifications for neuroscience still remain underexamined. Here we sketch the beginnings of a research program that could address these two outstanding challenges in terms of auditory perception. We review the neuroscience literature on passive listening, which is defined as listening without overt bodily movement, and conclude that sensorimotor theory provides a unique perspective on the consistent finding of motor system activation. In contrast to competing theories, this activation is predicted to be involved not only in the perception of speech-and action-related sounds, but in auditory perception in general. More specifically, we propose that the auditory processing associated with supplementary motor areas forms part of the neural basis of the exercise of sensorimotor know-how: these areas' recognized role in (1) facilitating spontaneous motor responses to sound and (2) supporting flexible engagement of sensorimotor processes to guide auditory experience and enable auditory imagery, can be understood in terms of two key characteristics of sensorimotor interaction, its (1) "alerting capacity" (or "grabbiness") and (2) "corporality" (or "bodiliness"), respectively. We also highlight that there is more to the inside of the body than the brain: there is an opportunity to develop sensorimotor theory into new directions in terms of the still poorly understood active processes of the peripheral auditory system.

Hidden Concepts in the History and Philosophy of Origins-of-Life Studies: a Workshop Report

Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres, 2019

In this review, we describe some of the central philosophical issues facing origins-of-life resea... more In this review, we describe some of the central philosophical issues facing origins-of-life research and provide a targeted history of the developments that have led to the multidisciplinary field of origins-of-life studies. We outline these issues and developments to guide researchers and students from all fields. With respect to philosophy, we provide brief summaries of debates with respect to (1) definitions (or theories) of life, what life is and how research should be conducted in the absence of an accepted theory of life, (2) the distinctions between synthetic, historical, and universal projects in origins-of-life studies, issues with strategies for inferring the origins of life, such as (3) the nature of the first living entities (the "bottom up" approach) and (4) how to infer the nature of the last universal common ancestor (the "top down" approach), and (5) the status of origins of life as a science. Each of these debates influences the others. Although there are clusters of researchers that agree on some answers to these issues, each of these debates is still open. With respect to history, we outline several independent paths that have led to some of the approaches now prevalent in origins-of-life studies. These include one path from early views of life through the scientific revolutions brought about by Linnaeus (von Linn.), Wöhler, Miller, and others. In this approach, new theories, tools, and evidence guide new thoughts about the nature of life and its origin. We also describe another family of paths motivated by a" circularity" approach to life, which is guided by such thinkers as Maturana & Varela, Gánti, Rosen, and others. These views echo ideas developed by Kant and Aristotle, though they do so using modern science in ways that produce exciting avenues of investigation. By exploring the history of these ideas, we can see how many of the issues that currently interest us have been guided by the contexts in which the ideas were developed. The disciplinary backgrounds of each of these scholars has influenced the questions they sought to answer, the experiments they envisioned, and the kinds of data they collected. We conclude by encouraging scientists and scholars in the humanities and social sciences to explore ways in which they can interact to provide a deeper understanding of the conceptual assumptions, structure, and history of origins-of-life research. This may be useful to help frame future research agendas and bring awareness to the multifaceted issues facing this challenging scientific question.

The Enactive Torch: Interactive embodied learning with a sensory substitution interface

by Tom Froese and Héctor Gómez Escobar

TIES, 2018

Traditionally, the pedagogical design for teaching and learning practices has been characterized ... more Traditionally, the pedagogical design for teaching and learning practices has been characterized as a process during which an active expert supports passive learner for the accomplishment of a specific goal or task. Nowadays, however, the accessibility of information technologies and the understanding of the learner’s active role have caused that interactive, embodied and contextual learning perspectives have begun to gain room. Here, we contribute with a technical report of a pilot study based on the Enactive Torch, a tool for the scientific study of perception, which aimed to investigate the crucial role of embodied process in the generation of perceptual experience for sensory substitution. In using this technological scaffolding, a group of students, from various academic disciplines, have coordinated and conducted three projects using different methods, each of them analyzing quantitative and qualitative data recorded from the participants’ first- and third-person perspective. By means of this practical engagement, the students gained awareness of the transformative potential of technology and developed insights into the challenges of performing interdisciplinary research with their peers, in regard to embodied perception and cognition. The study, therefore, serves as a proof-of-concept for the Enactive Torch, as a technological scaffolding, that can facilitate the kind of interactive learning that students need to gain a deeper understanding of the complexity of human embodied cognition and its relationship with technology.

On the spatiotemporal extensiveness of sense-making: Ultrafast cognition and the historicity of normativity

by Tom Froese and Laura Mojica

Synthese, 2019

The enactive approach conceives of cognition as acts of sense-making. A requirement of sense-maki... more The enactive approach conceives of cognition as acts of sense-making. A requirement of sense-making is adaptivity, i.e., the agent's capacity to actively monitor and regulate its own trajectories with respect to its viability constraints. However, there are examples of sense-making, known as ultrafast cognition, that occur faster than the time physiologically required for the organism to centrally monitor and regulate movements, for example via long-range neural feedback mechanisms. These examples open a clarificatory challenge for the enactive approach with respect to how to operationalize monitoring and regulation, and with respect to the temporal scale of sense-making, which has traditionally been limited to the here-and-now in accordance with the axiom of structural determinism. We explore possible responses to this challenge and suggest that this axiom should be explicitly rejected: adaptivity is a property of organism-environment interactions over a time span that includes both present and past conditions. Therefore, ultrafast performances are no longer a challenge for the enactive approach because the constitutive basis of their normativity is spatiotemporally extensive. This is in accordance with recent developments in different varieties of enactivism, which all converge toward assigning a constitutive role to an agent's history of interactions.

The Problem of Meaning in AI and Robotics: Still with Us after All These Years

by Tom Froese and Shigeru Taguchi

Philosophies, 2019

In this essay we critically evaluate the progress that has been made in solving the problem of me... more In this essay we critically evaluate the progress that has been made in solving the problem of meaning in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. We remain skeptical about solutions based on deep neural networks and cognitive robotics, which in our opinion do not fundamentally address the problem. We agree with the enactive approach to cognitive science that things appear as intrinsically meaningful for living beings because of their precarious existence as adaptive autopoietic individuals. But this approach inherits the problem of failing to account for how meaning as such could make a difference for an agent's behavior. In a nutshell, if life and mind are identified with physically deterministic phenomena, then there is no conceptual room for meaning to play a role in its own right. We argue that this impotence of meaning can be addressed by revising the concept of nature such that the macroscopic scale of the living can be characterized by physical indeterminacy. We consider the implications of this revision of the mind-body relationship for synthetic approaches.

Embodied dyadic interaction increases complexity of neural dynamics: A minimal agent-based simulation model

Frontiers in Psychology, 2019

The concept of social interaction is at the core of embodied and enactive approaches to social co... more The concept of social interaction is at the core of embodied and enactive approaches to social cognitive processes, yet scientifically it remains poorly understood. Traditionally, cognitive science had relegated all behavior to being the end result of internal neural activity. However, the role of feedback from the interactions between agent and their environment has become increasingly important to understanding behavior. We focus on the role that social interaction plays in the behavioral and neural activity of the individuals taking part in it. Is social interaction merely a source of complex inputs to the individual, or can social interaction increase the individuals' own complexity? Here we provide a proof of concept of the latter possibility by artificially evolving pairs of simulated mobile robots to increase their neural complexity, which consistently gave rise to strategies that take advantage of their capacity for interaction. We found that during social interaction, the neural controllers exhibited dynamics of higher-dimensionality than were possible in social isolation. Moreover, by testing evolved strategies against unresponsive ghost partners, we demonstrated that under some conditions this effect was dependent on mutually responsive co-regulation, rather than on the mere presence of another agent's behavior as such. Our findings provide an illustration of how social interaction can augment the internal degrees of freedom of individuals who are actively engaged in participation.

The Enactive Approach to Habits: New Concepts for the Cognitive Science of Bad Habits and Addiction

Frontiers in Psychology, 2019

Habits are the topic of a venerable history of research that extends back to antiquity, yet they ... more Habits are the topic of a venerable history of research that extends back to antiquity, yet they were originally disregarded by the cognitive sciences. They started to become the focus of interdisciplinary research in the 1990s, but since then there has been a stalemate between those who approach habits as a kind of bodily automatism or as a kind of mindful action. This implicit mind-body dualism is ready to be overcome with the rise of interest in embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive (4E) cognition. We review the enactive approach and highlight how it moves beyond the traditional stalemate by integrating both autonomy and sense-making into its theory of agency. It defines a habit as an adaptive, precarious, and self-sustaining network of neural, bodily, and interactive processes that generate dynamical sensorimotor patterns. Habits constitute a central source of normativity for the agent. We identify a potential shortcoming of this enactive account with respect to bad habits, since self-maintenance of a habit would always be intrinsically good. Nevertheless, this is only a problem if, following the mainstream perspective on habits, we treat habits as isolated modules. The enactive approach replaces this atomism with a view of habits as constituting an interdependent whole on whose overall viability the individual habits depend. Accordingly, we propose to define a bad habit as one whose expression, while positive for itself, significantly impairs a person’s well-being by overruling the expression of other situationally relevant habits. We conclude by considering implications of this concept of bad habit for psychological and psychiatric research, particularly with respect to addiction research.