The approaches to the recognition and detection of sentience in animals and in artificial systems are compared and found to differ substantially. There is an emphasis in investigations of animal sentience on finding empirical evidence of felt experience, usually of pain, and on structures such as a central nervous system. The standard of evidence for artificial sentience is weaker and tends to rely on the observation of external behaviour and appearance. Some of these differences are due to the contrasting influences of anthropomorphism and deception. Arguments against the likelihood of artificial sentience are presented. There is evidence of double standards, in the form of a lower bar for artificial sentience as compared to animal sentience. To counteract this, it is argued that we need to resist the effects of anthropomorphism and deception on views of artificial systems, and to maintain an awareness of their limitations and lack of sentience.
Adaptive behavior involves the perception of affordances, or opportunities for action. Since the term’s introduction by psychologist James J. Gibson in the 1960s, affordances have been the subject matter of those disciplines within psychology predominantly concerned with the study of perception. But the concept of affordances is not necessarily restricted to the psychological domain—and indeed, its creation was in the service of naturalizing the phenomenon of perception, giving perception significance for theorizing in biology. A central goal of the naturalization of perception was to provide a bridge between cognition and ecology, placing psychological phenomena in the world rather than in the head. The aim of this paper is to continue the project of the naturalization of perception by examining the particular phenomenon of how novel affordances are created through exploratory action, or “environmental tinkering”. This project is especially relevant for the study of evolutionary dynamics, given, as I will argue, the relevance of novel affordances for generating adaptive evolutionary change.
Reciprocal perceptual interactions (e.g., mutual gaze) play a central role in social cognition. However, reciprocity only fully makes sense in relation to the possibility of non-reciprocity: others may not perceive what we perceive or what we do. This enables concealment, deception, play, and many forms of social interaction. We adopt an enactive interactionist approach to investigate how perceptual interactions are formed and regulated at the boundary between reciprocity and non-reciprocity. These processes can be explained at the level of interaction dynamics alone, without invoking individual inferential mechanisms. We report two minimalist experiments: the first ( N = 40) reveals an attractor toward perceptual reciprocity; the second ( N = 92) shows that collective interaction enables participants to exploit action possibilities structured by variations in reciprocity, although these possibilities are not accessible from individual perceptual information alone. Together, these findings reveal an autonomous collective dynamic that enables action capacities based on the possibility of reciprocity, even though such capacities are initially absent at the individual level.
Interpersonal synergy offers a conceptual and methodological framework for analyzing coordinated interaction in dyads and groups. The framework aims at an inquiry of how individuals contribute to a collective behavior and how, in doing so, they coordinate and co-adapt their actions, hereby establishing specific patterns of interplay. The present review retraces the origins of the notion of interpersonal synergy, assesses its scope, delineates synergies from other forms of interaction, and discusses possible mechanisms (such as mutual affordance responsiveness or shared intentions) that mediate the creation of such synergies. It then presents a contrastive “bestiary” of synergy types, which highlights the many shapes and forms in which the phenomenon occurs (e.g., collaborative vs. competitive, spontaneous vs. planned). The final two sections survey analytical approaches, from quantitative metrics which formalize “dynamic fingerprints” of collective dynamics to qualitative and mixed methods studies, which include 1 st person perspectives on synergy formation.
The coordination of competitively coupled systems is notoriously complex. One-v.-one attacker-defender interactions (1v1s), common in team sports, provide a vehicle for investigating the role of nonlinear interactions between timescales during competitive coordination. This study tracked movements of 20 amateur players in a 1v1 futsal task, modelling the attacker’s leading role and the dyad’s nonlinear interactivity with an anticipatory-synchronisation metric and multifractality, respectively. Anticipatory synchronisation encoded how well an attacker could pre-empt a defender’s movements. Multifractality encoded variability and comparison to linear surrogates encoded nonlinear interactions across scales. Generalised linear mixed-effects modelling showed that attackers scored more points when they anticipatorily synchronised with defenders’ movements and promoted greater multifractal variability in defenders, as well as in a collective variable pooling dyadic variability. Attackers scored more when they themselves constrained their own multifractal nonlinearity to generate targeted attacks. Thus, competitive coordination in invasion games rests on nonlinear cross-timescale interactions, not just linear sequences of perceptual, cognitive, and motor processes. Explanations of 1v1s may need to address both independent-player contributions and shared nonlinear interactivity. Finally, we discuss avenues for future research on the multiscale dynamics of competitive co-adaptation in sport and related contexts.
