Embodied cognition represents one of most important theoretical developments in contemporary cognitive science. Many cognitive processes appear to be influenced by body morphology, emotions, and sensorimotor systems. This perspective is supported by an ever increasing collection of empirical studies that fall into two broad classes: one consisting of experiments that implicate action, emotion, ...

Cognitivistic approaches to human thought and behavior have been very successful in tracing, identifying, and analyzing the processes and mechanisms underlying human cognition. However, they have created and strengthened the image of humans as couch potatoes that have incredibly interesting thoughts and mental simulations but hardly translate any of those into real action. Moreover, the strateg...

We present cedar , a software framework for the implementation and simulation of embodied cognitive models based on Dynamic Field Theory (DFT). DFT is a neurally inspired theoretical framework that integrates perception, action, and cognition. cedar captures the power of DFT in software by facilitating the process of software development for embodied cognitive systems, both artificial and as mo...

Embodied Cognition is an approach to cognition that departs from traditional cognitive science in its reluctance to conceive of cognition as computational and in its emphasis on the significance of an organism’s body in how and what the organism thinks. Three lines of embodied cognition research are described and some thoughts on the future of embodied cognition offered. The embodied cognition ...

How much about our interactions with—and experience of—our world can be deduced from basic principles? This paper reviews recent attempts to understand the self-organised behaviour of embodied agents, like ourselves, as satisfying basic imperatives for sustained exchanges with the environment. In brief, one simple driving force appears to explain many aspects of perception, action and the perce...

Much research in cognitive science and AI has recently been devoted to the study of adaptive autonomous agents, such as robots and artificial life systems. Such agents are typically said to ‘learn, ‘develop’ and ‘evolve’ in close interaction with their environments. It could be argued that these self-organizing properties solve the problem of representation grounding in AI research, and thus al...

In this short paper we describe a robotic setup to study the self-organization of conceptualisation and language. What distinguishes this project from others is that we envision a robot with speci c cognitive capacities, but without resorting to any pre-programmed representations or conceptualisations. The key to this all is self-organization and enculturation. We report preliminary results on ...

for each X such that blood-disorder(X) appears in the database for each Y such that symptom(X, Y) appears in the database for each Z such that involves(Y, Z) appears in the database if Z=gastrointestinal-track then return true return false Of course, this is a simple case of automated reasoning; it doesn’t really use much in the way of inference rules. However, even simple examples like this ca...

“While many have begun making the case for ‘embodied cognition’—resituating the mind in the body—Derek Melser takes the next step: resituating the embodied mind in its social milieu. Cognition is argued to be something that people do, and is thus publicly observable in their interactions rather than hidden away inside their heads. The Act of Thinking is a pivotal book and a significant contribu...

In this experiment we investigate how older adults perceive an embodied agent as compared to younger people in the context of an information giving task. Our results show that older adults found the agent less friendly and likeable than the younger participants in our experiment, and that they had a strong preference for a human presenter. However, the older adults were relatively positive on s...