Acquiring Rules for Rules: Neuro-Dynamical Systems Account for Meta-Cognition

Both animals and humans use meta-rules in their daily life, in order to adapt their behavioral strategies on changing environmental situations. Typically, the term meta-rule encompasses those rules that are applied to rules themselves. In cognitive science, conventional approaches for designing meta-rules follow human hard-wired architectures. In contrast to previous approaches, the current work employs evolutionary processes to explore neuronal mechanisms accounting for meta-level rule switching. In particular, we performed a series of experiments with a simulated robot that has to learn to switch between different behavioral rules in order to accomplish given tasks. Continuous time recurrent neural networks (CTRNN) controllers with either a fully connected or a bottleneck architecture were examined. The obtained results showed that different rules are represented by separate selforganized attractors, while rule switching is enabled by the transitions among attractors. Furthermore, the results showed that neural network division into a lower sensory-motor Adaptive Behavior, Vol.17, No.1, pp.58-80, 2009.