New frontiers in the neuroscience of the sense of agency

The sense that I am the author of my own actions, including the ability to distinguish my own from other people's actions, is a fundamental building block of our sense of self, on the one hand, and successful social interactions, on the other. Using cognitive neuroscience techniques, researchers have attempted to elucidate the functional basis of this intriguing phenomenon, also trying to explain pathological abnormalities of action awareness in certain psychiatric and neurological disturbances. Recent conceptual, technological, and methodological advances suggest several interesting and necessary new leads for future research on the neuroscience of agency. Here I will describe new frontiers for the field such as the need for novel and multifactorial paradigms, anatomically plausible network models for the sense of agency, investigations of the temporal dynamics during agentic processing and ecologically valid virtual reality (VR) applications

Tchnąć nowe życie w kognitywistykę

[Przekład] W artykule tym opowiadam się za zunifikowaną kognitywistyką, przyjmując dla swej argumentacji niecodzienny punkt wyjścia: stanowisko określane czasem jako „teza o kontinuum życia-umysłu”. Zamiast więc traktować jako pewnik powszechnie akceptowane założenia początkowe, a następnie proponować odpowiedzi na pewne dobrze określone pytania, muszę najpierw dowieść, że koncepcja kontinuum życia-umysłu może w ogóle stanowić właściwy punkt startowy. Zacznę zatem od oceny pojęciowych narzędzi, odpowiednich do budowania teorii umysłu na tej podstawie. Czerpiąc spostrzeżenia z wielu różnych dziedzin – szczególnie z połączenia egzystencjalistycznej fenomenologii ze skoncentrowaną na organizmie biologią – dowodzę, że można pojmować umysł jako zakorzeniony w życiu, ale tylko wtedy, gdy równocześnie zgodzimy się, że interakcja społeczna gra konstytutywną rolę w naszych zdolnościach poznawczych

INDCOR white paper 3: Interactive Digital Narratives and Interaction

The nature of interaction within Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) is inherently complex. This is due, in part, to the wide range of potential interaction modes through which IDNs can be conceptualised, produced and deployed and the complex dynamics this might entail. The purpose of this whitepaper is to provide IDN practitioners with the essential knowledge on the nature of interaction in IDNs and allow them to make informed design decisions that lead to the incorporation of complexity thinking throughout the design pipeline, the implementation of the work, and the ways its audience perceives it. This white paper is concerned with the complexities of authoring, delivering and processing dynamic interactive contents from the perspectives of both creators and audiences. This white paper is part of a series of publications by the INDCOR COST Action 18230 (Interactive Narrative Design for Complexity Representations), which all clarify how IDNs representing complexity can be understood and applied (INDCOR WP 0 - 5, 2023).Comment: 17 pages, 1 figur

Breathing new life into cognitive science

In this article I take an unusual starting point from which to argue for a unified cognitive science, namely a position defined by what is sometimes called the ‘life-mind continuity thesis’. Accordingly, rather than taking a widely accepted starting point for granted and using it in order to propose answers to some well defined questions, I must first establish that the idea of life-mind continuity can amount to a proper starting point at all. To begin with, I therefore assess the conceptual tools which are available to construct a theory of mind on this basis. By drawing on insights from a variety of disciplines, especially from a combination of existential phenomenology and organism-centered biology, I argue that mind can indeed be conceived as rooted in life, but only if we accept at the same time that social interaction plays a constitutive role for our cognitive capacities

Our Academic Sandbox: Scholarly Identities Shaped through Play, Tantrums, Building Castles, and Rebuffing Backyard Bullies

This paper presents four teacher educators’ stories that explore their scholarly identity development through an Academic Sandbox metaphor where Play, Tantrums, Building Castles, and Rebuffing Backyard Bullies, serve as creative constructs for describing their experiences of triumphs and challenges in academia. The authors share how a professional learning community (Faculty Academy) functioned as the safe space for “participatory sense-making” (See De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007) where situated agency emerged and became strengthened through the telling of the teachers’ stories (Archer, 2003; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Kligyte, 2011; McGann, 2014; McLean, Pasupathi, & Pals, 2007). Stories representative of each metaphorical construct are presented and discussed. Narrative inquiry served as the methodological means in which the authors examined their stories as representative events in identity formation

Does the brain know who is at the origin of what in an imitative interaction?

Brain correlates of the sense of agency have recently received increased attention. However, the explorations remain largely restricted to the study of brains in isolation. The prototypical paradigm used so far consists of manipulating visual perception of own action while asking the subject to draw a distinction between self- versus externally caused action. However, the recent definition of agency as a multifactorial phenomenon combining bottom-up and top-down processes suggests the exploration of more complex situations. Notably there is a need of accounting for the dynamics of agency in a two-body context where we often experience the double faceted question of who is at the origin of what in an ongoing interaction. In a dyadic context of role switching indeed, each partner can feel body ownership, share a sense of agency and altogether alternate an ascription of the primacy of action to self and to other. To explore the brain correlates of these different aspects of agency, we recorded with dual EEG and video set-ups 22 subjects interacting via spontaneous versus induced imitation (II) of hand movements. The differences between the two conditions lie in the fact that the roles are either externally attributed (induced condition) or result from a negotiation between subjects (spontaneous condition). Results demonstrate dissociations between self- and other-ascription of action primacy in delta, alpha and beta frequency bands during the condition of II. By contrast a similar increase in the low gamma frequency band (38–47 Hz) was observed over the centro-parietal regions for the two roles in spontaneous imitation (SI). Taken together, the results highlight the different brain correlates of agency at play during live interactions

Convergently emergent- ecological and enactive approaches to the texture of agency (Pre-published)

Enactive and ecological approaches to cognitive science both claim a “mutuality” between agents and their environments – that they have a complementary nature and should be addressed as a single whole system. Despite this apparent agreement, each offers criticisms of the other on precisely this point – enactivists claiming that ecological psychologists over-emphasize the environment, while the complementary criticism, of agent-centered constructivism, is leveled by ecological psychologists at enactivists. In this paper I suggest that underlying the confusion between the two approaches is the complexity of agency, which comes in different forms, at different scales or levels of analysis. Cognitive science has not theorized the relationship between these different forms in a sufficiently disciplined manner, and a task therefore remains of finding a way to map the complex territory of agency.Ye

Sociocultural affordances and enactment of agency: A transactional view

This article argues that when attempting to extend the concept of affordances to encompass action possibilities characteristic of our sociocultural environments, a transactionally informed relational perspective—along the lines formulated by classical pragmatist thinkers (especially Dewey and Bentley but also Peirce and Mead)—proves useful. A transactional perspective helps to reveal the intimate conceptual connections between sociocultural affordances (SCAs) and agency: both are crucially about contextually defined goal-directed doings, and about learning to fluently master particular patterns of habits, skills, and sociocultural practices in culturally appropriate and socially feasible ways. The paper outlines first, critical issues in the conceptualization of SCAs; second, how the concept of SCAs also points towards a transactional conception of agency enactment; and third, how a transactional view helps to make sense of some of the apparently puzzling tensions and fringe areas between various conceptualizations of (sociocultural) affordances and agency.Peer reviewe

Reconceptualizing second-person interaction

Over the last couple of decades, most neuroscientific research on social cognition has been dominated by a third-person paradigm in which participating subjects are not actively engaging with other agents but merely observe them. Recently this paradigm has been challenged by researchers who promote a second-person approach to social cognition, and emphasize the importance of dynamic, real-time interactions with others. The present article's contribution to this debate is twofold. First, we critically analyze the second-person challenge to social neuroscience, and assess the various ways in which the distinction between second- versus third-person modes of social cognition has been articulated. Second, we put forward an alternative conceptualization of this distinction—one that gives pride of place to the notion of reciprocity. We discuss the implications of our proposal for neuroscientific studies on social cognition