Theoretical behaviorism meets embodied cognition: two theoretical analyses of behavior

Behavior{Oriented Approaches to Cognition: Theoretical Perspectives

Understanding complex behavior requires a multidisplinary eeort from the neu-rosciences, psychology, behavioral biology, and computer science. This paper gives an overview of the current state of theoretical thinking in the eld. The focus is on a behavior{oriented approach to cognition, i.e., not so much on the mental representations themselves, but on the behaviors that do require these repres...

Theoretical and Empirical Analyses

Information-Theoretical Aspects of Embodied Artificial Intelligence

Nervous systems are complex structure whose connectivity reflects statistical regularities of their surrounding sensory world. A key theoretical rationale for embodied artificial intelligence originates from the observation that organisms or embodied agents actively structure their inputs through physical interactions with and coupling to their environments. In this talk, I will survey some key...

At the root of embodied cognition: cognitive science meets neurophysiology.

Recent experimental research in the field of neurophysiology has led to the discovery of two classes of visuomotor neurons: canonical neurons and mirror neurons. In light of these studies, we propose here an overview of two classical themes in the cognitive science panorama: James Gibson's theory of affordances and Eleanor Rosch's principles of categorization. We discuss how theoretical perspec...

Theoretical Distributed Computing Meets Biology: A Review

In recent years, several works have demonstrated how the study of biology can benefit from an algorithmic perspective. Since biological systems are often distributed in nature, this approach may be particularly useful in the context of distributed computing. As the study of algorithms is traditionally motivated by an engineering and technological point of view, the adaptation of ideas from theo...