COMPUTATIONAL SYNTHESIS IN ENACTIVE COGNITIVE SCIENCE

David Vernon is a Professor of Informatics at

the University of Skvde, Sweden. He works on
cognitive systems and is particularly interested
in modeling autonomy. Over the past 34 years, he
has held positions at Westinghouse Electric, Trinity
College Dublin, the European Commission, the
National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Science
Foundation Ireland, and Khalifa University, UAE.

86

Tool-use Leads to Bodily

Extension, but not Bodily
Incorporation: The Limits
of Mind-as-it-could-be?
Tom Froese

Universidad Nacional Autnoma

de Mxico
t.froese/at/gmail.com

> Upshot Sato and colleagues make

use of an innovative method that combines robotics modeling and psychological experimentation to investigate
how tool use afects our living and lived
embodiment. I situate their approach in
a general shift from robotics to humancomputer interface studies in enactive
cognitive science, and speculate about
the necessary conditions for the bodily
incorporation of tools.
Putting subjectivity back into
the sensorimotor loop
1 Enactive cognitive science (ECS)
is founded on the theory that life and mind
are integrated within a process of sensemaking (hompson 2007). Following its
irst extensive presentation by Francisco
Varela, Evan hompson and Eleanor Rosch
(1991), the paradigm of enaction was oten
loosely grouped with embodied, sensorimotor, and dynamical approaches to cognition, while its explicit phenomenological
commitments were mostly ignored. and
whereas these latter approaches rapidly led
to the development of new styles of doing
cognitive science and robotics (Wheeler
2005; Clark 2008; Kelso 1995), speciically
enactive research continues to face unique
challenges today. For if we accept that cognition is a form of sense-making, and that

ConStRuCtIVISt FoundatIons

vol. 9, n1

sense-making is the generation and appreciation of meaning from a point of view,

then ECS in contrast to most science and
engineering methods has to place living
and lived subjectivity at the center of all its
endeavors (Froese 2011).
2 here are therefore some unique
methodological challenges for ECS. While
embodied and dynamical approaches can
be satisied with aI and robotics to do a
lot of their theoretical work (e.g., Pfeifer
& Scheier 1999; Beer 2000), enactive aI
is speciically confronted by the profound
problem of how to design a sense-maker
something for which we still lack theoretical and practical knowledge (Froese &
Ziemke 2009). Given this impasse, it was to
be expected that ECS would shit its methodological focus from constructing and
analyzing artiicial agents to phenomenological investigations of human experience
(Froese 2007). However, there is still plenty
of room for innovative use of technology.
3 one of the most resourceful developments in this direction is a hybrid
methodology that retains the idea of constructing new technical systems, but for the
purpose of investigating how tool use via
its efects on our living embodiment modulates our lived experience (Froese, Suzuki,
ogai & Ikegami 2012). In analogy with artiicial lifes objective to use technology to explore life-as-it-could-be, we can refer to this
ield as artiicial embodiment and deine
its aim as mapping out the space of mindas-it-could-be.
4 he authors of the present target article, Yuki Sato, Hiroyuki Iizuka, and
takashi Ikegami, make a valuable contribution to this cross-disciplinary method
by investigating the phenomenon of extended embodiment currently a hot topic
(hompson & Stapleton 2009) by bringing
together insights from both robotics modeling and psychological experimentation.
hey thereby join a new generation of enactive researchers who are just as interested in
the dynamics of artiicial agents as they are
in the sense-making of humans, oten relating these two areas in a mutually informing manner by making use of custom-built
human-computer interfaces (e.g., Rohde
2010; Iizuka, ando & Maeda 2009; Suzuki,
Wakisaka & Fujii 2012; Suzuki, Garinkel,
Critchley & Seth, in press). In the following,

I situate the work by Sato et al. in this wider

context. I begin by clarifying their method,
and conclude by deriving a new working
hypothesis from their results.

Tool use as a method to investigate

mind-as-it-could-be
5 While conducting a study of the
experiential efects of using a sensorimotor substitution device (Froese, McGann,
Bigge, Spiers & Seth 2012), I started working out a basic methodological scheme for
an enactive approach to consciousness research based on human-computer interfaces (HCI). his scheme is nicely illustrated
by the series of psychological experiments
by Sato and colleagues (Figure1).
6 We can see this scheme at work in
the study by Sato et al. as follows. First, they
completed the methodological cycle in the
domain of artiicial life. hey synthesized
an evolutionary robotics model, analyzed
its emergent dynamics, and formulated a
hypothesis, i.e., that tool-based extension
of bodily sensitivity is correlated with the
regularity of the users movements (26). to
test this hypothesis of lived bodily extension
properly, they then conducted a psychological experiment on users experience. hey
synthesized a simpliied real version of
the single windmill tool to be used with
a stick,
allowed the participants to become
skilled users,
analyzed the resulting user experience
albeit measured indirectly via objective
success, and
received a partial conirmation of their
hypothesis.
7 hey then embarked on the methodological cycle again. hey
constructed a more accurate version of
the double-windmill tool,
allowed participants to become suiciently skilled,
assessed their experience, and
formulated a novel hypothesis.
More speciically, in contrast to their initial assumption, they found that objective
success at the task is not an appropriate indirect measure of the lived experience of bodily extension. Rather, strong and continuous
coupling between user and tool seems to be
more important to shiting their attention
away from the tool (37). his hypothesis

Enactive Cognitive Science

The Limits of Mind-as-it-could-be? Tom Froese

could not have been derived solely from

the modeling study or just in terms of participants objective performance, thereby
conirming the necessity of including irstperson phenomenological analysis in the
enactive approach and in the science of consciousness more generally.1

From bodily extension to bodily

incorporation
8 Based on their new hypothesis,
i.e., that the strength of coupling is expected
to correlate with the strength of feeling bodily extension, Sato et al. propose to conduct
future experiments in which the strength of
coupling between user and tool is the parameter to be manipulated (46). While it
would be useful to conirm this expectation,
I propose a more radical research agenda.
9 When discussing how people experience hand-held tools we must take care
to distinguish several possibilities. as Sato
et al. acknowledge (5), the user could be
either focused on the tool as such, in which
case they feel the tool in contact with their
body, or they could be focused on the task,
such that they perceive via the tool and
tactile sensitivity is extended to where the
tool makes contact with the objects being
manipulated. Indeed, it is probably the potential for extended action, rather than constant physical contact per se, that constitutes
the feeling of bodily extension (McGann,
Froese, Bigge, Spiers & Seth 2011).
10 nevertheless, it is also evident
that these tools are not experienced as a
part of the living body, in the way that a
hand is (and a prosthesis should be) felt. We
therefore need to distinguish, following the
proposal by Helena de Preester and Manos
tsakiris (2009), between bodily extension
and bodily incorporation. hey theorize
that a pre-existing body model normatively
constrains which kind of tools can become
incorporated into the living body, namely
those tools that it within the normal human
body plan, such as successful prostheses.
However, the results by Sato et al. hint at an1 | a similar dissociation between objective
performance and phenomenological report was
found in a study of alterations in felt embodiment
based on the rubber hand illusion (Rohde, di
Luca & Ernst 2011), showing that the inding by
Sato et al. is not an isolated case.

1
Design of
new human-computer
interface (HCI)

Generation
of hypotheses

Synthesis
of interface

Artificial
Embodiment

Interpretation of data
according to theory
of lived experience

Acquisition of
practical expertise
in using the HCI

Emergence
of experience

Collection of data
about characteristics
of user experience

Analysis
of experience

Figure 1: Methodological scheme proposed for a growing ield that, in analogy with the ield
of artiicial life, we might call artiicial embodiment. In order to investigate a hypothesis about
the embodied mind, a novel human-computer interface (HCI) is constructed with the speciic
aim of modulating a users sensorimotor embodiment so as to enable the experimental
manipulation of the users irst-person perspective. (Figure adapted from Froese, Suzuki, Ogai
& Ikegami 2012).

other possibility, which is more in line with

enactive thinking.
11 he key results found by Sato et
al. are twofold: (a) that the acquisition of
skillful tool use is correlated with increases
in coordinated movements, and (b) that the
feeling of bodily extension via the tool additionally depends on strong continuous
physical contact. his dependence on both
physical and coordinated coupling makes
sense, because the living body is a physically
bounded whole of semi-autonomous parts
(Varela 1991) that are linked by coordination
dynamics (Kelso 1995). So why did the subjects not experience bodily incorporation? Is
it because the tools did not it into the human body model? I am not convinced by
this response. to be sure, Sato et al.s sticks
and windmills do not have direct counterparts in our normal body morphology, but
even the designers of the most advanced
prostheses still face signiicant challenges
(Kwok 2013).
12 I suggest that the answer has more
to do with how the movements of the tool
it with the intended actions of the subject.
While the tip of a hand-held stick is robustly coordinated with the movements of
my hand (the two always move rigidly together), my hand is adaptively coordinated
with the actions of my arm and body (my
ingers autonomously and correctly adjust

their coniguration depending on whether I

am reaching for my keys or my cofee cup).
hese micro-actions are neither a purely
mechanical process nor are they something
that I intentionally do; they are context-sensitive behaviors situated in between these
extremes (Beaton 2013: 302f). I therefore
suggest that if a tool is to become fully incorporated, its movements have to follow their
own localized norms, and these norms must
be in adaptive coordination with the normative situation of the agent as a whole (Froese,
in press). a step in the right direction might
be to design anticipatory human-computer
interfaces for which the tool-user relation
resembles the coordination dynamics of a
social interaction (Iizuka, ando & Maeda
2009).
Tom Froese completed his D.Phil. in cognitive
science from the University of Sussex in 2009. He is
currently a postdoctoral researcher at the National
Autonomous University of Mexico. He investigates
the relationship between life, mind and sociality
using a variety of methods, including evolutionary
robotics, systems theory, and phenomenology.
Received: 16 october 2013
accepted: 18 october 2013

http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/journal/9/1/073.sato

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