Beehive scale-free emergent dynamics.

It has been repeatedly reported that the collective dynamics of social insects exhibit universal emergent properties similar to other complex systems. In this note, we study a previously published data set in which the positions of thousands of honeybees in a hive are individually tracked over multiple days. The results show that the hive dynamics exhibit long-range spatial and temporal correlations in the occupancy density fluctuations, despite the characteristic short-range bees' mutual interactions.

An open-source perceptual crossing device for investigating brain dynamics during human interaction.

The Perceptual Crossing Device (PCD) introduced in this report is an updated tool designed to facilitate the exploration of brain activity during human interaction with seamless real time integration with EEG equipment. It incorporates haptic and auditory feedback mechanisms, enabling interactions between two users within a virtual environment. Through a unique circular motion interface that enables intuitive virtual interactions, users can experience the presence of their counterpart via tactile or auditory cues.

Irruption and Absorption: A 'Black-Box' Framework for How Mind and Matter Make a Difference to Each Other.

Cognitive science is confronted by several fundamental anomalies deriving from the mind-body problem. Most prominent is the problem of mental causation and the hard problem of consciousness, which can be generalized into the hard problem of agential efficacy and the hard problem of mental content. Here, it is proposed to accept these explanatory gaps at face value and to take them as positive indications of a complex relation: mind and matter are one, but they are not the same.

Inter-brain desynchronization in social interaction: a consequence of subjective involvement?

Hyperscanning approaches to human neuroscience aim to uncover the neural mechanisms of social interaction. They have been largely guided by the expectation that increased levels of engagement between two persons will be supported by higher levels of inter-brain synchrony (IBS). A common approach to measuring IBS is phase synchrony in the context of EEG hyperscanning.

Beehive scale-free emergent dynamics.

It has been repeatedly reported that the collective dynamics of social insects exhibit universal emergent properties similar to other complex systems. In this note, we study a previously published data set in which the positions of thousands of honeybees in a hive are individually tracked over multiple days. The results show that the hive dynamics exhibit long-range spatial and temporal correlations in the occupancy density fluctuations, despite the characteristic short-range bees' mutual interactions.

From autopoiesis to self-optimization: Toward an enactive model of biological regulation.

The theory of autopoiesis has been influential in many areas of theoretical biology, especially in the fields of artificial life and origins of life. However, it has not managed to productively connect with mainstream biology, partly for theoretical reasons, but arguably mainly because deriving specific working hypotheses has been challenging. The theory has recently undergone significant conceptual development in the enactive approach to life and mind.

From tech to tact: emotion dysregulation in online communication during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Recent theorizing argues that online communication technologies provide powerful, although precarious, means of emotional regulation. We develop this understanding further. Drawing on subjective reports collected during periods of imposed social restrictions under COVID-19, we focus on how this precarity is a source of emotional dysregulation.

Irruption Theory: A Novel Conceptualization of the Enactive Account of Motivated Activity.

Cognitive science is lacking conceptual tools to describe how an agent's motivations, as such, can play a role in the generation of its behavior. The enactive approach has made progress by developing a relaxed naturalism, and by placing normativity at the core of life and mind; all cognitive activity is a kind of motivated activity. It has rejected representational architectures, especially their reification of the role of normativity into localized "value" functions, in favor of accounts that appeal to system-level properties of the organism.

Behaviour and the Origin of Organisms.

It is common in origins of life research to view the first stages of life as the passive result of particular environmental conditions. This paper considers the alternative possibility: that the antecedents of life were already actively regulating their environment to maintain the conditions necessary for their own persistence. In support of this proposal, we describe 'viability-based behaviour': a way that simple entities can adaptively regulate their environment in response to their health, and in so doing, increase the likelihood of their survival.

Corrigendum: The pandemic experience survey II: A second corpus of subjective reports of life under social restrictions during COVID-19 in the UK, Japan, and Mexico.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpubh.2022.

Evidence of Critical Dynamics in Movements of Bees inside a Hive.

Social insects such as honey bees exhibit complex behavioral patterns, and their distributed behavioral coordination enables decision-making at the colony level. It has, therefore, been proposed that a high-level description of their collective behavior might share commonalities with the dynamics of neural processes in brains. Here, we investigated this proposal by focusing on the possibility that brains are poised at the edge of a critical phase transition and that such a state is enabling increased computational power and adaptability.

The Problem of Meaning: The Free Energy Principle and Artificial Agency.

Biological agents can act in ways that express a sensitivity to context-dependent relevance. So far it has proven difficult to engineer this capacity for context-dependent sensitivity to relevance in artificial agents. We give this problem the label the "problem of meaning".

Ecological and Convergent Validity of Experimentally and Dynamically Assessed Capacity for Social Contingency Detection Using the Perceptual Crossing Experiment in Adolescence.

The Perceptual Crossing Experiment (PCE) captures the capacity for social contingency detection using real-time social interaction dynamics but has not been externally validated. We tested ecological and convergent validity of the PCE in a sample of 208 adolescents from the general population, aged 11 to 19 years. We expected associations between PCE performance and (a) quantity and quality of social interaction in daily life, using Experience Sampling Methodology (ESM; ecological validity) and (b) self-reported social skills using a questionnaire (convergent validity).

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

The social brain hypothesis proposes that enlarged brains have evolved in response to the increasing cognitive demands that complex social life in larger groups places on primates and other mammals. However, this reasoning can be challenged by evidence that brain size has decreased in the evolutionary transitions from solitary to social larger groups in the case of Neolithic humans and some eusocial insects. Different hypotheses can be identified in the literature to explain this reduction in brain size.

Unsupervised Learning Facilitates Neural Coordination Across the Functional Clusters of the Connectome.

Modeling of complex adaptive systems has revealed a still poorly understood benefit of unsupervised learning: when neural networks are enabled to form an associative memory of a large set of their own attractor configurations, they begin to reorganize their connectivity in a direction that minimizes the coordination constraints posed by the initial network architecture. This self-optimization process has been replicated in various neural network formalisms, but it is still unclear whether it can be applied to biologically more realistic network topologies and scaled up to larger networks. Here we continue our efforts to respond to these challenges by demonstrating the process on the connectome of the widely studied nematode worm .

The Effects of Daytime Psilocybin Administration on Sleep: Implications for Antidepressant Action.

Serotonergic agonist psilocybin is a psychedelic with antidepressant potential. Sleep may interact with psilocybin's antidepressant properties like other antidepressant drugs via induction of neuroplasticity. The main aim of the study was to evaluate the effect of psilocybin on sleep architecture on the night after psilocybin administration.

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.

The enactive theory of perception hypothesizes that perceptual access to objects depends on the mastery of sensorimotor contingencies, that is, on the know-how of the regular ways in which changes in sensations depend on changes in movements. This hypothesis can be extended into the social domain: perception of other minds is constituted by mastery of self-other contingencies, that is, by the know-how of the regular ways in which changes in others' movements depend on changes in one's movements. We investigated this proposal using the perceptual crossing paradigm, in which pairs of players are required to locate each other in an invisible one-dimensional virtual space by using a minimal haptic interface.

What binds us? Inter-brain neural synchronization and its implications for theories of human consciousness.

The association between neural oscillations and functional integration is widely recognized in the study of human cognition. Large-scale synchronization of neural activity has also been proposed as the neural basis of consciousness. Intriguingly, a growing number of studies in social cognitive neuroscience reveal that phase synchronization similarly appears across brains during meaningful social interaction.

Where Is the Action in Perception? An Exploratory Study With a Haptic Sensory Substitution Device.

Enactive cognitive science (ECS) and ecological psychology (EP) agree that active movement is important for perception, but they remain ambiguous regarding the precise role of agency. EP has focused on the notion of sensorimotor invariants, according to which bodily movements play an instrumental role in perception. ECS has focused on the notion of sensorimotor contingencies, which goes beyond an instrumental role because skillfully regulated movements are claimed to play a constitutive role.

Investigating real-time social interaction in pairs of adolescents with the Perceptual Crossing Experiment.

The study of real-time social interaction provides ecologically valid insight into social behavior. The objective of the current research is to experimentally assess real-time social contingency detection in an adolescent population, using a shortened version of the Perceptual Crossing Experiment (PCE). Pairs of 148 adolescents aged between 12 and 19 were instructed to find each other in a virtual environment interspersed with other objects by interacting with each other using tactile feedback only.

Hidden Concepts in the History and Philosophy of Origins-of-Life Studies: a Workshop Report.

In this review, we describe some of the central philosophical issues facing origins-of-life research and provide a targeted history of the developments that have led to the multidisciplinary field of origins-of-life studies. We outline these issues and developments to guide researchers and students from all fields. With respect to philosophy, we provide brief summaries of debates with respect to (1) definitions (or theories) of life, what life is and how research should be conducted in the absence of an accepted theory of life, (2) the distinctions between synthetic, historical, and universal projects in origins-of-life studies, issues with strategies for inferring the origins of life, such as (3) the nature of the first living entities (the "bottom up" approach) and (4) how to infer the nature of the last universal common ancestor (the "top down" approach), and (5) the status of origins of life as a science.