The cognitive body: From dynamic modulation to anticipation

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. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.