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    Basics of Embodied Cognition EC treats cognition as a set of tools evolved by organisms for coping with their environments. Each of the key terms in this characterization—tool, evolved, organisms, coping, and environment—has a special significance for, and casts a particular light on, the study of the mind. EC thereby foregrounds the following six facts.
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    One of the most foundational and continually contested questions in the cognitive sciences is the degree to which the functional organization of the brain can be understood as modular. In its classic formulation, a module was defined as a cognitive sub-system with nine specific properties; the classic module is, among other things, domain specific, encapsulated, and implemented in dedicated neural substrates. Most of the examinations—and especially the criticisms—of the modularity thesis have fo…Read more
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    Maintaining adequate performance in dynamic and uncertain settings has been a perennial stumbling block for intelligent systems. Nevertheless, any system intended for real-world deployment must be able to accommodate unexpected change—that is, it must be perturbation tolerant. We have found that metacognitive monitoring and control—the ability of a system to self-monitor its own decision-making processes and ongoing performance, and to make targeted changes to its beliefs and action-determining …Read more
  •  510
    Embodied cognition: A field guide
    Artificial Intelligence 149 (1): 91-130. 2003.
    The nature of cognition is being re-considered. Instead of emphasizing formal operations on abstract symbols, the new approach foregrounds the fact that cognition is, rather, a situated activity, and suggests that thinking beings ought therefore be considered first and foremost as acting beings. The essay reviews recent work in Embodied Cognition, provides a concise guide to its principles, attitudes and goals, and identifies the physical grounding project as its central research focus
  •  41
    Towards Moral Machines: A Discussion with Michael Anderson and Susan Leigh Anderson
    with Susan Leigh Anderson, Alkis Gounaris, and George Kosteletos
    Conatus 6 (1). 2021.
    At the turn of the 21st century, Susan Leigh Anderson and Michael Anderson conceived and introduced the Machine Ethics research program, that aimed to highlight the requirements under which autonomous artificial intelligence systems could demonstrate ethical behavior guided by moral values, and at the same time to show that these values, as well as ethics in general, can be representable and computable. Today, the interaction between humans and AI entities is already part of our everyday lives; …Read more
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    We would like to thank the following for contributing to the journal as reviewers this past year: Rebecca Abraham Fred Adams
    with Ken Aizawa, Anna Alexandrova, Sophie Allen, Holly Anderson, Kristin Andrews, Andre Ariew, Edward Averill, and Andrew R. Bailey
    Philosophical Psychology 21 (6): 859-860. 2008.
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    The Leabra architecture: Specialization without modularity
    with Alexander A. Petrov, David J. Jilk, and Randall C. O'Reilly
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (4): 286-287. 2010.
    The posterior cortex, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex in the Leabra architecture are specialized in terms of various neural parameters, and thus are predilections for learning and processing, but domain-general in terms of cognitive functions such as face recognition. Also, these areas are not encapsulated and violate Fodorian criteria for modularity. Anderson's terminology obscures these important points, but we applaud his overall message.
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    Reuse of identified neurons in multiple neural circuits
    with Jeremy E. Niven and Lars Chittka
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (4): 285. 2010.
    The growing recognition by cognitive neuroscientists that areas of vertebrate brains may be reused for multiple purposes either functionally during development or during evolution echoes a similar realization made by neuroscientists working on invertebrates. Because of these animals' relatively more accessible nervous systems, neuronal reuse can be examined at the level of individual identified neurons and fully characterized neural circuits
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    What we need is better theory, not more data
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (2): 125-126. 2006.
    Although I find Blair's case for arguing for the distinction between fluid cognitive functions and general intelligence less than compelling, I believe him. However, I also believe that what is required next is a theory of both general intelligence and fluid cognitive functions that articulates the distinction. In the absence of this, more data, particularly of the neuroscience variety, is likely to stall rather than advance progress. (Published Online April 5 2006).
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    Prelinguistic agents will form only egocentric representations
    with Tim Oates
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (3): 284-285. 2003.
    The representations formed by the ventral and dorsal streams of a prelinguistic agent will tend to be too qualitatively similar to support the distinct roles required by PREDICATE(x) structure. We suggest that the attachment of qualities to objects is not a product of the combination of these separate processing streams, but is instead a part of the processing required in each. In addition, we suggest that the formation of objective predicates is inextricably bound up with the emergence of langu…Read more
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    For the least the last 10 years, there has been growing interest in, and grow- ing evidence for, the intimate relations between more abstract or higher order cognition—such as reasoning, planning, and language use—and the more con- crete, immediate, or lower order operations of the perceptual and motor sys- tems that support seeing, feeling, moving, and manipulating. A sub-field of the larger research program in embodied cognition (Clark, 1997, 1998; Wilson, 2001; Anderson, 2003, 2007d, 2008; Gi…Read more
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    Reviews (review)
    Embodied cognition (EC) is growing up, and How the Body Shapes the Mind is both a sign of, and substantive contributor to, this ongoing development. Born in or about 1991 (the year of publication of seminal works by Brooks, Dreyfus, and Varela, Thompson & Rosch), EC is only now emerging from a tumultuous but exciting childhood marked in particular by the size and breadth of the extended family hoping to have some impact on its early education and upbringing. As family members include computer sc…Read more
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    Description: The massive redeployment hypothesis (MRH) is a theory about the functional organization of the human cortex, offering a middle course between strict localization on the one hand, and holism on the other. Central to MRH is the claim that cognitive evolution proceeded in a way analogous to component reuse in software engineering, whereby existing components—originally developed to serve some specific purpose—were used for new purposes and combined to support new capacities, without di…Read more
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    When things go badly, we notice that something is amiss, figure out what went wrong and why, and attempt to repair the problem. Artificial systems depend on their human designers to program in responses to every eventuality and therefore typically don’t even notice when things go wrong, following their programming over the proverbial, and in some cases literal, cliff. This article describes our work on the Meta-Cognitive Loop, a domain-general approach to giving artificial systems the ability to…Read more
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    Predictive validity of the N2 and P3 ERP components to executive functioning in children: a latent-variable analysis
    with Christopher R. Brydges, Allison M. Fox, and Corinne L. Reid
    Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8. 2014.
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    The status of machine ethics: A report from the AAAI symposium (review)
    Minds and Machines 17 (1): 1-10. 2007.
      This paper is a summary and evaluation of work presented at the AAAI 2005 Fall Symposium on Machine Ethics that brought together participants from the fields of Computer Science and Philosophy to the end of clarifying the nature of this newly emerging field and discussing different approaches one could take towards realizing the ultimate goal of creating an ethical machine
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    Machine Ethics (edited book)
    Cambridge Univ. Press. 2011.
    The essays in this volume represent the first steps by philosophers and artificial intelligence researchers toward explaining why it is necessary to add an ...
  •  11
    Frequency-tagging in memory - context or reactivation?
    with Wimber Maria, Hanslmayr Simon, and Henson Rik
    Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 9. 2015.
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