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

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

Perceptual crossing: the simplest online paradigm

Researchers in social cognition increasingly realize that many phenomena cannot be understood by investigating offline situations only, focusing on individual mechanisms and an observer perspective. There are processes of dynamic emergence specific to online situations, when two or more persons are engaged in a real-time interaction that are more than just the sum of the individual capacities or behaviors, and these require the study of online social interaction. Auvray et al.'s (2009) perceptual crossing paradigm offers possibly the simplest paradigm for studying such online interactions: two persons, a one-dimensional space, one bit of information, and a yes/no answer. This study has provoked a lot of resonance in different areas of research, including experimental psychology, computer/robot modeling, philosophy, psychopathology, and even in the field of design. In this article, we review and critically assess this body of literature. We give an overview of both behavioral experimental research and simulated agent modeling done using the perceptual crossing paradigm. We discuss different contexts in which work on perceptual crossing has been cited. This includes the controversy about the possible constitutive role of perceptual crossing for social cognition. We conclude with an outlook on future research possibilities, in particular those that could elucidate the link between online interaction dynamics and individual social cognition

Minimalist Approach to Perceptual Interactions

Work aimed at studying social cognition in an interactionist perspective often encounters substantial theoretical and methodological difficulties: identifying the significant behavioral variables; recording them without disturbing the interaction; and distinguishing between: (a) the necessary and sufficient contributions of each individual partner for a collective dynamics to emerge; (b) features which derive from this collective dynamics and escape from the control of the individual partners; and (c) the phenomena arising from this collective dynamics which are subsequently appropriated and used by the partners. We propose a minimalist experimental paradigm as a basis for this conceptual discussion: by reducing the sensory inputs to a strict minimum, we force a spatial and temporal deployment of the perceptual activities, which makes it possible to obtain a complete recording and control of the dynamics of interaction. After presenting the principles of this minimalist approach to perception, we describe a series of experiments on two major questions in social cognition: recognizing the presence of another intentional subject; and phenomena of imitation. In both cases, we propose explanatory schema which render an interactionist approach to social cognition clear and explicit. Starting from our earlier work on perceptual crossing we present a new experiment on the mechanisms of reciprocal recognition of the perceptual intentionality of the other subject: the emergent collective dynamics of the perceptual crossing can be appropriated by each subject. We then present an experimental study of opaque imitation (when the subjects cannot see what they themselves are doing). This study makes it possible to characterize what a properly interactionist approach to imitation might be. In conclusion, we draw on these results, to show how an interactionist approach can contribute to a fully social approach to social cognition

Stability of coordination requires mutuality of interaction in a model of embodied agents

Abstract. We used an evolutionary robotics methodology to generate pairs of simulated agents capable of reliably establishing and maintaining a coordination pattern under noisy conditions. Unlike previous related work, agents were only evolved for this ability and not for their capacity to discriminate social contingency (i.e., a live responsive partner) from noncontingent engagements (i.e, a recording). However, when they were made to interact with a recording of their partner made during a successful previous interaction, the coordination pattern could not be established. An analysis of the system’s underlying dynamics revealed (i) that stability of the coordination pattern requires ongoing mutuality of interaction, and (ii) that the interaction process is not only constituted by, but also constitutive of, individual behavior. We suggest that this stability of coordination is a general property of a certain class of interactively coupled dynamical systems, and conclude that psychological explanations of an individual’s sensitivity to social contingency need to take into account the role of the interaction process

Behavioural robustness and the distributed mechanisms hypothesis

A current challenge in neuroscience and systems biology is to better understand properties that allow organisms to exhibit and sustain appropriate behaviours despite the effects of perturbations (behavioural robustness). There are still significant theoretical difficulties in this endeavour, mainly due to the context-dependent nature of the problem. Biological robustness, in general, is considered in the literature as a property that emerges from the internal structure of organisms, rather than being a dynamical phenomenon involving agent-internal controls, the organism body, and the environment. Our hypothesis is that the capacity for behavioural robustness is rooted in dynamical processes that are distributed between agent ‘brain’, body, and environment, rather than warranted exclusively by organisms’ internal mechanisms. Distribution is operationally defined here based on perturbation analyses. Evolutionary Robotics (ER) techniques are used here to construct four computational models to study behavioural robustness from a systemic perspective. Dynamical systems theory provides the conceptual framework for these investigations. The first model evolves situated agents in a goalseeking scenario in the presence of neural noise perturbations. Results suggest that evolution implicitly selects neural systems that are noise-resistant during coupling behaviour by concentrating search in regions of the fitness landscape that retain functionality for goal approaching. The second model evolves situated, dynamically limited agents exhibiting minimalcognitive behaviour (categorization task). Results indicate a small but significant tendency toward better performance under most types of perturbations by agents showing further cognitivebehavioural dependency on their environments. The third model evolves experience-dependent robust behaviour in embodied, one-legged walking agents. Evidence suggests that robustness is rooted in both internal and external dynamics, but robust motion emerges always from the systemin-coupling. The fourth model implements a historically dependent, mobile-object tracking task under sensorimotor perturbations. Results indicate two different modes of distribution, one in which inner controls necessarily depend on a set of specific environmental factors to exhibit behaviour, then these controls will be more vulnerable to perturbations on that set, and another for which these factors are equally sufficient for behaviours. Vulnerability to perturbations depends on the particular distribution. In contrast to most existing approaches to the study of robustness, this thesis argues that behavioural robustness is better understood in the context of agent-environment dynamical couplings, not in terms of internal mechanisms. Such couplings, however, are not always the full determinants of robustness. Challenges and limitations of our approach are also identified for future studies