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The Cognitive Body: From Dynamic Modulation to Anticipation

  • Conference paper
Anticipatory Behavior in Adaptive Learning Systems (ABiALS 2008)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 5499))

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Abstract

Starting from the situated and embodied perspective on the study of cognition as a source of inspiration, this paper programmatically outlines a path towards an experimental exploration of the role of the body in a minimal anticipatory cognitive architecture. Cognition is here conceived and synthetically analyzed as a broadly extended and distributed dynamic process emerging from the interplay between a body, a nervous system and their environment. Firstly, we show how a non-neural internal state, crucially characterized by slowly changing dynamics, can modulate the activity of a simple neurocontroller. The result, emergent from the use of a standard evolutionary robotic simulation, is a self-organized, dynamic action selection mechanism, effectively operating in a context dependent way. Secondly, we show how these characteristics can be exploited by a novel minimalist anticipatory cognitive architecture. Rather than a direct causal connection between the anticipation process and the selection of the appropriate behavior, it implements a model for dynamic anticipation that operates via bodily mediation (bodily-anticipation hypothesis). This allows the system to swiftly scale up to more complex tasks never experienced before, achieving flexible and robust behavior with minimal adaptive cost.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Humanities and Informatics, University of Skövde, SE-541 28, Skövde, Sweden

    Alberto Montebelli, Robert Lowe & Tom Ziemke

Authors
  1. Alberto Montebelli
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  2. Robert Lowe
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  3. Tom Ziemke
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche,Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli”, Via Giuseppe Moruzzi, 1 - 56124 Pisa, Italy and Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche,Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione, Via San Martino della Ba, Italy

    Giovanni Pezzulo

  2. COBOSLAB – Cognitive Bodyspaces: Learning and Behavior, Department of Psychology III, University of Würzburg, Röntgenring 11, 97070, Würzburg, Germany

    Martin V. Butz

  3. Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique (CNRS UMR 7222), Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Pyramide Tour 55, 4 Place Jussieu, 75252, Paris Cedex 05, France

    Olivier Sigaud

  4. Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione, Laboratory of Computational Embodied Neuroscience, Via San Martino della Battaglia 44, 00185, Roma, Italy

    Gianluca Baldassarre

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Montebelli, A., Lowe, R., Ziemke, T. (2009). The Cognitive Body: From Dynamic Modulation to Anticipation. In: Pezzulo, G., Butz, M.V., Sigaud, O., Baldassarre, G. (eds) Anticipatory Behavior in Adaptive Learning Systems. ABiALS 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5499. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02565-5_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02565-5_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-02564-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-02565-5

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