Tom Froese

Dr. Tom Froese is a cognitive scientist with a background in artificial life and complex systems theory. His research addresses foundational questions regarding the origin and nature of the human mind by integrating philosophy of mind, computational modeling, and human subjects research.

Froese is particularly known for his contributions to the embodied and enactive approach to cognitive science, which conceives of the mind as an emergent natural phenomenon that is brain-, body-, and world-involving. At OIST, this work has culminated in a novel framework, irruption theory (Froese, 2024).

Lines of research

A methodological implication of Froese’s approach is participatory realism. Given that the sensorimotor dynamics of perceptual experience not only loop through the body, but also through the external world, perception involves making contact with the object. Hence, we can appreciate the process of scientific observation in its full complexity: it is a socio-materially augmented process of becoming acquainted with the observed object that—like tool-use and object-perception more generally—is irreducibly self-, other-, and world-involving (Froese, 2022).

An open question is how to conceive of this process of mind making contact with the world. An influential idea has been that of active perception. Froese has been putting this idea to a range of experimental tests using a custom-designed haptic sensory substitution interface, the Enactive Torch. Contrary to expectations, it seems that voluntarily doing movements, rather than passively undergoing them, does not contribute much to some perceptual tasks. A recent experiment by ECSU at OIST replicated this finding and pointed to a more differentiated role of being active: having the right intention (Sangati et al., 2023).

Another open question is how to conceive of two minds making contact with each other. Traditionally, lived experience is viewed as internal and hence private. Froese’s research has employed a range of agent-based models to demonstrate how social interaction matters to brain and behavior (e.g. Reséndiz-Benhumea et al., 2021). Moreover, the relational concept of perceptual experience raises another intriguing possibility: when “we” share a moment together, we are participating in the unfolding of one shared experience. This could be based on an extended functional network arising from inter-brain neural synchrony (Valencia & Froese, 2020). 

To experimentally test this possibility, ECSU has developed a costum-designed haptic human-computer interface, called the Perceptual Crossing Device (Estelle et al., 2024), to record movement dynamics of two participants engaged in real-time bodily interaction while conducting brain and body “hyperscanning”. Based on the resulting analyses, and on other converging lines of evidence, it seems that there may be another important factor at play in shared experience, possibly pushing inter-brain dynamics toward transient desynchronization (Froese et al., 2024).

In sum, the embodied, participatory concept of the human mind leads to the expectation that we should experimentally discover the signatures of this involvement in brain and behavior. And yet we do not find immediate benefits; rather, increased subjective involvement can have a disordering effect. Froese has proposed a novel resolution of these tensions in the form of irruption theory: given that the subjective mind is categorically not reducible to physiology, then its involvement can only manifest from the perspective of physiological inertia as an external noise term – an irruption of divergent dynamics (Froese, 2023; Froese et al., in press). 

Irruption theory raises the question of how actions align with intentions: there is an “intention-action gap” that must be bridged (James & Froese, 2025). Froese has been developing a response to this question by drawing on mathematical models of complex adaptive systems. These models illustrate that a simple combination of attractor dynamics, associative learning, and occasional irruption-like state resets can lead the system to self-organize better coordination and generalization of behavior (Froese et al., 2023).

What these lines of research suggest is that we are justified in trusting our bodies to do the right thing because behavior is shaped by our whole history of interactions.

References

• Estelle, S., Uhlig, K., Zapata-Fonseca, L., Lerique, S., Morrissey, B., Sato, R., & Froese, T. (2024). An open-source perceptual crossing device for investigating brain dynamics during human interaction. Plos One,19(6), e0305283. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0305283
• Froese, T. (2022). Scientific observation is socio-materially augmented perception: Toward a participatory realism. Philosophies, 7(2), 37. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies7020037
• Froese, T. (2023). Irruption Theory: A novel conceptualization of the enactive account of motivated activity. Entropy, 25(5), 748. https://doi.org/10.3390/e25050748
• Froese, T. (2024). Irruption and absorption: A ‘black-box’ framework for how mind and matter make a difference to each other. Entropy, 26(4), 288. https://doi.org/10.3390/e26040288
• Froese, T., Karelin, G., & Ikegami, T. (in press). Making meaning matter with irruption theory: Bridging efficacy and uncertainty by satisfying the participation criterion. In K. Kull & D. Favareau (Eds.), Semiotics of Biology: Making Meaning in Living Systems. The MIT Press. https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/22824
• Froese, T., Loh, C. L., & Putri, F. (2024). Inter-brain desynchronization in social interaction: A consequence of subjective involvement? Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 18, 809. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2024.1359841
• Froese, T., Weber, N., Shpurov, I., & Ikegami, T. (2023). From autopoiesis to self-optimization: Toward an enactive model of biological regulation. BioSystems, 230(104959). https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.02.05.527213
• James, M. M., & Froese, T. (2025). 4E cognition and the intention-action gap: Conceptual resources for behavior change. Intellectica, 82, 63-93. 
• Reséndiz-Benhumea, G. M., Sangati, E., Sangati, F., Keshmiri, S., & Froese, T. (2021). Shrunken social brains? A minimal model of the role of social interaction in neural complexity. Frontiers in Neurorobotics,15(634085). https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbot.2021.634085
• Sangati, E., Lobo, L., Estelle, S., Sangati, F., Tavassoli, S., & Froese, T. (2023). Uncovering the role of intention in active and passive perception. In M. Goldwater, F. K. Anggoro, B. K. Hayes, & D. C. Ong (Eds.), Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 663-670). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6wj762mq
• Valencia, A. L., & Froese, T. (2020). What binds us? Inter-brain neural synchronization and its implications for theories of human consciousness. Neuroscience of Consciousness, 2020(1), niaa010. https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niaa010