We have enhanced a computational cognitive agent by embodying it with real and simulated bodies operating in real and simulated worlds. This has allowed us to experiment with various ways that embodiment in-uences the creation and meaning of the agent's beliefs and other terms in its knowledge base, including: symbol-grounding by perception and action; rst-person privileged knowledge; the repre...

We have enhanced a computational cognitive agent by embodying it with real and simulated bodies operating in real and simulated worlds. This has allowed us to experiment with various ways that embodiment influences the creation and meaning of the agent’s beliefs and other terms in its knowledge base, including: symbol-grounding by perception and action; firstperson privileged knowledge; the rep...

The problem of which cues, internal or external, permit a person to label and identify his own emotional state has been with us since the days that James (1890) first tendered his doctrine that "the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion" (p. 449). Since we are aware of a variety of feeling and em...

Recently, robotics research has focused on issues surrounding the interaction modalities with robots, how these robots should look like and how their behavior should adapt while interacting with humans. It is believed that in the near future robots will be more prevalent around us. Thus it is important to understand accurately our reactions and dispositions toward robots in different circumstan...

In future Ambient Intelligence environments we assume intelligence embedded in the environment and its virtual, sometimes visualized agents (virtual humans). These environments support the human inhabitants or visitors in their activities and interactions by perceiving them through their sensors. In this paper we look at our research on bodily and gestural interaction with environments equipped...

A range of studies in the past decade and a half indicate significant impacts of tool use on body image. In cases of intentional action, contractions of near space or experienced extensions of limbs have been shown when using tools such as rakes. It remains unclear whether the changes in body image are effected by the tool enabling perception at a distance or action/manipulation of the environm...

In the initial stages of schizophrenia, the environment as perceived by the patient changes into a puzzling, mysterious and stage-like scenery. At the same time, objects or persons may gain an overwhelming physiognomic expression and may even fuse with the patient's body. The paper explains these different alterations using Husserl's concept of intentional perception on the one hand, and Merlea...

Recent research on bodily self-consciousness has assumed that it consists of three distinct components: the experience of owning a body (body ownership); the experience of being a body with a given location within the environment (self-location); and the experience of taking a first-person, body-centered, perspective on that environment (perspective). Here we review recent neuroimaging studies ...

Partial and full own-body illusions of neurological origin have been claimed crucial to understand the contribution of bodily experience and perception to self-consciousness. Whereas partial body illusions are relatively common and well defined, much less is known about full own-body illusions, and even less is known about these illusions in children. Here we describe a 10-year-old patient with...

The most basic foundations of the self arguably lie in those brain systems that represent the body (Blanke and Metzinger 2009;Damasio 2000; Gallagher 2005; Jeannerod 2006; Knoblich 2002; Metzinger et al. 2007). The representation of the body is complex, involving the encoding and integration of a wide range of multisensory (somatosensory, visual, auditory, vestibular, visceral) and motor signal...