In spite of the remarkable progress made in the burgeoning field of social neuroscience, the neural mechanisms that underlie social encounters are only beginning to be studied and could-paradoxically-be seen as representing the "dark matter" of social neuroscience. Recent conceptual and empirical developments consistently indicate the need for investigations that allow the study of real-time social encounters in a truly interactive manner. This suggestion is based on the premise that social cognition is fundamentally different when we are in interaction with others rather than merely observing them. In this article, we outline the theoretical conception of a second-person approach to other minds and review evidence from neuroimaging, psychophysiological studies, and related fields to argue for the development of a second-person neuroscience, which will help neuroscience to really "go social"; this may also be relevant for our understanding of psychiatric disorders construed as disorders of social cognition.

/pdf/toward-a-second-person-neuroscience-3cc8z1fj3t.pdf

Toward a second-person neuroscience.

Enactive artificial intelligence: Investigating the systemic organization of life and mind

There is a small but growing community of researchers spanning a spectrum of disciplines which are united in rejecting the still dominant computationalist paradigm in favor of the enactive approach. The framework of this approach is centered on a core set of ideas, such as autonomy, sense-making, emergence, embodiment, and experience. These concepts are finding novel applications in a diverse range of areas. One hot topic has been the establishment of an enactive approach to social interaction. The main purpose of this paper is to serve as an advanced entry point into these recent developments. It accomplishes this task in a twofold manner: (i) it provides a succinct synthesis of the most important core ideas and arguments in the theoretical framework of the enactive approach, and (ii) it uses this synthesis to refine the current enactive approach to social interaction. A new operational definition of social interaction is proposed which not only emphasizes the cognitive agency of the individuals and the irreducibility of the interaction process itself, but also the need for jointly co-regulated action. It is suggested that this revised conception of ‘socio-cognitive interaction’ may provide the necessary middle ground from which to understand the confluence of biological and cultural values in personal action.

The enactive approach: Theoretical sketches from cell to society

Agency: Its role in mental development

Embodied approaches to cognition hold that the body is crucial for cognition. Yet despite many
decades of research,1 what this “embodiment thesis”2 (Wilson and Foglia, 2011) amounts to still
remains unclear, as the present volume with its diverse range of contributions indicates (see also
Shapiro, 2011). How to interpret the embodiment thesis depends on how to interpret the
meanings of its key terms, “body” and “cognition,” as well as on what it means exactly to say that
the body is “crucial” for cognition (Kyselo and Di Paolo, in press). In recent years, the term
“embodied” has been used elastically to refer to anything from conservative ideas about how
bodily action provides a format for neuronal representations (Goldman and de Vignemont, 2009;
Gallese, 2010; Goldman, 2012) or helps to reduce computational load (Clark, 2008; Wheeler,
2005, 2010; Wilson, 2004), to a variety of “radical embodiment” (Clark, 1999; Thompson and
Varela, 2001) proposals-for example, that kinesthetic body schemas are a constitutive part of
mental skills (Lakoﬀ and Johnson, 1999; Nunez, 2010), that sensorimotor know-how is a constitutive part of perceptual experience (O’Regan and Noe, 2001; Noe, 2004), that bodily life
regulation is a constitutive part of phenomenal consciousness and its extended neurophysiological
substrates (Thompson and Varela, 2001; Thompson and Cosmelli, 2011), and that social
sensorimotor interaction can be a constitutive part of social cognition (De Jaegher, Di Paolo, and
Gallagher, 2010). In some cases, these radical embodiment proposals are based on the “enactive”
view that cognition depends constitutively on the living body, understood as an autonomous
system (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, 1991; Thompson, 2007; Di Paolo, 2009; Froese and
Ziemke, 2009). Our aim in this chapter is to explain this key enactive notion of autonomy and
why it is needed if embodied cognitive science is to oﬀer a genuine alternative to more traditional
functionalist and cognitivist views.

https://sacral.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/pdf/froese_pragcog_2011.pdf

The enactive approach

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 non-contingent 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.

/pdf/stability-of-coordination-requires-mutuality-of-interaction-2rvn43cys7.pdf

Stability of Coordination Requires Mutuality of Interaction in a Model of Embodied Agents

This study presents an extended model of homeostatic adaptation designed to exploit the internal dynamics of a neural network in the absence of sensory input. In order to avoid typical convergence to asymptotic states under these conditions plastic changes in the network are induced in evolved neurocontrollers leading to a renewal of dynamics that may favour sensorimotor adaptation. Other measures are taken to avoid loss of internal variability (as caused, for instance, by synaptic strength saturation). The method allows the generation of reliable adaptation to morphological disruptions in a simple simulated vehicle using a homeostatic neurocontroller that has been selected to behave homeostatically while performing the desired behaviour but non-homeostatically in other circumstances. The performance is compared with simple homeostatic neural controllers that have only been selected for a positive link between internal and behavioural stability. The extended homeostatic networks perform much better and are more adaptive to morphological disruptions that have never been experienced before by the agents.

https://ezequieldipaolo.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/iizuka_dipaolo_sab2008.pdf

Extended Homeostatic Adaptation: Improving the Link between Internal and Behavioural Stability

Continuous-time recurrent neural networks affected by random additive noise are evolved to produce phototactic behaviour in simulated mobile agents The resulting neurocontrollers are evaluated after evolution against perturbations and for different levels of neural noise Controllers evolved with neural noise are more robust and may still function in the absence of noise Evidence from behavioural tests indicates that robust controllers do not undergo noise-induced bifurcations or if they do, the transient dynamics remain functional A general hypothesis is proposed according to which evolution implicitly selects neural systems that operate in noise-resistant landscapes which are hard to bifurcate and/or bifurcate while retaining functionality

Ezequiel A. Paolo

Papers

Stability of Coordination Requires Mutuality of Interaction in a Model of Embodied Agents

Extended Homeostatic Adaptation: Improving the Link between Internal and Behavioural Stability

Neural Noise Induces the Evolution of Robust Behaviour by Avoiding Non-functional Bifurcations