Embodied Dyadic Interaction Increases Complexity of Neural Dynamics: A Minimal Agent-Based Simulation Model

Abstract

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

“…This aim and basis stand in sharp contrast to what has been characterized as the ''methodological individualism'' of traditional cognitive science (Boden, 2006), which in its more extreme formulations has even taken an isolated brain as the in-principle sufficient basis of all social experience (Searle, 1990). Nevertheless, the notion of genuine intersubjectivity is consistent with a small but growing number of psychological and neuroscientific experiments as well as agentbased simulation studies, which point to the constitutive role of social interaction for social cognition (e.g., De Jaegher et al, 2010;Schilbach et al, 2013;Candadai et al, 2019).…”

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

“…Furthermore, entropy has been suggested as a possible correlate of consciousness by the "entropic brain hypothesis" (Carhart-Harris, 2018). 1 Additionally, as stated in more recent work (Candadai et al, 2019), some previous studies have associated high levels of neural entropy with enhanced cognitive performance, e.g., improved generalization in motor learning tasks (Dotov and Froese, 2018).…”

“…Research (Froese and Di Paolo, 2010;Froese et al, 2013;Campos and Froese, 2017;Candadai et al, 2019;Reséndiz-Benhumea et al, 2020) suggests that in the absence of in-group competition, 2 it is easier to evolve increased complexity of neural activity in close interaction with other agents, than to do so alone by increasing the intrinsic complexity of the neural network architecture. In the present study, we extend these findings by focusing on the role of brain size in generating complexity of neural activity in solitary and social conditions.…”

Musical novices perform with equal accuracy when learning to drum alone or with a peer

“…In a recent experimental study, Schiavio and colleagues 29 demonstrated that novices learning music together can enhance their reciprocal learning ability if they practice in synchrony or in turn-taking with each other, rather than in other (e.g., imitative) learning modalities. Within such settings, social interaction—the ongoing network of self-sustaining and recursive dynamics that one is at the same time situated in and actively responsible for—“could allow an individual to overcome the limitations of their individual capacities by incorporating the complex dynamics of the interaction process into the basis of their internal activity” 30 . The present contribution continues this investigation by exploring the capacity of novices to coordinate with each other in a learning context based on joint drumming.…”