Anticipations, Brains, Individual and Social Behavior: An Introduction to Anticipatory Systems

Research on anticipatory behavior in adaptive learning systems continues to gain more recognition and appreciation in various research disciplines. This book provides an overarching view on anticipatory mechanisms in cognition, learning, and behavior. It connects the knowledge from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics with that of artificial intelligence, machine learning, cognitive robotics, and others. This introduction offers an overview over the contributions in this volume highlighting their interconnections and interrelations from an anticipatory behavior perspective. We first clarify the main foci of anticipatory behavior research. Next, we present a taxonomy of how anticipatory mechanisms may be beneficially applied in cognitive systems. With relation to the taxonomy, we then give an overview over the book contributions. The first chapters provide surveys on currently known anticipatory brain mechanisms, anticipatory mechanisms in increasingly complex natural languages, and an intriguing challenge for artificial cognitive systems. Next, conceptualizations of anticipatory processes inspired by cognitive mechanisms are provided. Subsequent chapters address predictive challenges in vision and the processing of event correlations over time. Next, anticipatory mechanisms in individual decision making and behavioral execution are studied. Finally, the book offers systems and conceptualizations of anticipatory processes involved in social interaction.