Pathways of embodied simulation

Recently, so called simulation (or emulation) theories [e.g. 1 ch. 9, 2-5] have discovered and embraced, to a greater or lesser degree, the old empiricist and associationist idea that thinking is covert action and perception. In brief, covert action refers to the brain’s ability to reactivate several of the neural processes and structures used to produce an overt action, but without any overt movements. Consequently, covert perception means reactivating several of the neural processes that create percepts without any external stimulation to the sense organs. Furthermore, chained covert actions and perceptions can be used to plan ahead, and as pointed out by [6], for example, this type of planning is biologically plausible since it reuses existing behavior generating structures [cf. 7]. Inspired by existing models of embodied simulation [2, 3, 6, 8], we identify the necessary components for the realization of extended and adaptive simulated chains of behavior, and identify possible biological mechanisms of embodied simulation, which include at least two types of prediction [9], to inform modeling approaches. The details of our own robotic experiments are omitted here, due to spatial restrictions, and left for the full paper.