We take the approach developed by Rietveld and RAAAF to be a paradigm example of a much-needed development in embodied cognitive science: applying the insights gained into the nature of cognition back to embodied cognition itself, back to the practice of bodily engagements with our sociocultural environments. Rietveld’s work is groundbreaking precisely because it stands almost alone as a prototype

Aggregation, a widely observed behavior in social insects, is the gathering of individuals on any location or on a cue. The former being called the self-organized aggregation, and the latter being called the cue-based aggregation. One of the fascinating examples of cue-based aggregation is the thermotactic behavior of young honeybees. Young honeybees aggregate on optimal temperature zones in the hive

This reflection on Erik Rietveld’s The Affordances of Art for Making Technologies addresses, first, what it is to engage in material philosophy and make material propositions and then, second, what different materialities, or rather different ways of handling materialities, allow material philosophers to say. It notes that solidity is not an intrinsic property of any stuff. If only they are handled

Erik Rietveld’s lecture describes the creation of architectural works from the point of view of the architects. We are curious about architectural space as a living system: what happens once the architects have left? We introduce the space syntax notion of virtual community, and suggest that this is compatible with Rietveld’s distinction between the field and the landscape of affordances.

The explosion of online knowledge has made knowledge, paradoxically, difficult to find. A web or journal search might retrieve thousands of articles, ranked in a manner that is biased by, for example, popularity or eigenvalue centrality rather than by informed relevance to the complex query. With hundreds of thousands of articles published each year, the dense, tangled thicket of knowledge grows even

Sensorimotor theory of perception has been criticized for its ambiguity about the need for internal representations and the lack of a proper account of agency and subjective experience. The book under review offers a compelling non-representational, world-involving interpretation, and operationalization of this theory, showing that alternatives to representationalism are viable. It also provides a

Peer-to-peer learning paradigm is seldom used in studying how farmers can increase yield. In this article, agent-based modelling has been applied to study the chances of dairy farmers increasing annual milk yield by learning better farming strategies from each other. Two sets of strategies were considered; in one set (S), each farmer agent would possess a number of farming strategies based on their

Taking up Rietveld’s challenge for philosophers to join with artists in investigating the questions of how to live better, this comment argues (a) that this conjunction of philosophy and art is already underway in the discipline of anthropology, (b) that it need not be limited to non-verbal investigations and (c) that a focus on the performative power of words enables us to close the gap between visual

Postural control is a complex process requiring both sensory and motor responses. Perturbation-based balance training has emerged as an effective fall prevention intervention, which provides physical postural perturbations for postural control training and adaptation. With the advent of technology, virtual reality (VR) has also been used for fall prevention training by providing visual postural perturbations

In this study, we use mobile robots as physical entities to model the iterated learning of collections of forms that consist of randomly generated movement sequences. The robots implement an abstract model of embodied iterated social learning in which the forms evolve due to limited perceptual abilities of the robots during multiple learning cycles. It is shown that shared chunks that consisted of

In this article, an adaptive consensus model that considers individual disappointment emotion is proposed for emergency multi-attribute group decision-making (MAGDM) problems with hesitant fuzzy linguistic information. Subsequently, it is applied to choose the optimal emergency alternative(s) for the prevention and control of COVID-19 on a college campus. The main innovations and contributions of this

In this article, I aim to elucidate minimality in cooperation by drawing on a previously developed multi-dimensional approach to cooperation. This approach provides a useful framework to locate any cooperative phenomenon at a specific point on the continua of different dimensions. That point, in turn, determines the criteria for a particular cooperative phenomenon to emerge. Thus, on one hand, the

This article considers the adaptive setting and probable origins of human aesthetic capabilities, using evidence of the Acheulean tradition in the last million years, and highlighting the importance of the preceding and enveloping social and technological contexts. Acheulean bifaces, made from about 1.75 to 0.1 Ma, often with an appearance of symmetry, give windows on crucial interlocking aspects of

It has been claimed that post-cognitivist approaches to cognition might be compatible with computationalism. A growing number of authors argue that if computations are theorized as non-representational and mechanistic, then many concepts typical of the enactive approach can also be used in computational contexts and vice versa. In this article, we evaluate the solidity and coherence of this potential

This essay introduces a special issue focused on 4E cognition (cognition as embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) in the Lower Palaeolithic. In it, we review the typological and representational cognitive approaches that have dominated the past 50 years of paleoanthropology. These have assumed that all representations and computations take place only inside the head, which implies that the archaeological

The purpose of this article is to review the evolution and function of the cerebellum, particularly in regard to its role in creativity and expert stone knapping. First, the article reviews the history of the cerebellum, its evolution and phylogenetics, and its concerted evolution with various brain regions. It also notes the critical role of the cerebellum and the cerebro-cerebellar network in its

This study aimed to examine the effects of age and the task difficulty on postural sway, variability and complexity. The participants were 90 able-bodied individuals including children (n = 39; age: 5.89 ± 0.94 years), young adults (n = 30; age: 23.23 ± 1.61 years) and older adults (n = 21; age: 64.59 ± 5.24 years) who took part in different balance tasks that had different levels of cognitive and

Through brain-inspired modeling studies, cognitive neurorobotics aims to resolve dynamics essential to different emergent phenomena at the level of embodied agency in an object environment shared with human beings. This article is a review of ongoing research focusing on model dynamics associated with human self-consciousness. It introduces the free energy principle and active inference in terms of

How the boundaries of the mind should be drawn with respect to action and the material world is a core research question that cognitive archaeology shares with contemporary cognitive sciences. The study of hominin technical thinking, as in the case of stone tool making, is a good way to bring that question to the fore. This article argues that archaeologists who study lithic artefacts and their transformations

Organized as a satellite to the annual Conference on Complex Systems, the Evolution of Cultural Complexity held its inaugural workshop in Tempe, Arizona, in 2015, a second in Cancún, Mexico, in 2017, and a third in Thessaloniki, Greece, in 2018. The goal of those satellite sessions was to bring together a community of researchers from different fields who had interests in the evolution of cultural

The aim of this study was to determine the effect of contextual interference on learning of adapted sailing for people with spinal cord injury. Seven participants with traumatic spinal injury were selected to undergo learning in an adapted boat equipped with wind-measuring instrument. A learning program, defined by two conditions, (1) blocked practice and (2) random practice, was applied. In blocked

Tool use can be considered in terms of purposeful behaviour. This emphasis on ‘purpose’ hides a host of assumptions about the nature of cognition and its relationship with physical activity. In particular, a notion of ‘purpose’ might assume that this is teleological which, in turn, requires a model of a desired end state of an action that can be projected onto the environment. Such a model is fundamental

While ecological psychology and embodied approaches to cognition have gained traction within the literature on non-human primate tool use, a fear of making assumptions on behalf of animal minds means that their application has been conservative, often retaining the methodological individualism of the cognitivist approach. As a result, primate models for technical and cognitive evolution, rooted in

Boundaries are prominent ingredients of reality, including—most importantly—the boundaries of organisms and the perceived boundaries of things (their surfaces). It is also customary to think of minds as kinds of bounded loci for thoughts, representations, and other internal entities, targeting the borderline between the internal domain and the external world as a genuine barrier. Therefore, not surprisingly

The increase of violence in Mexico and consequent suffering during the last decades is evident, but its effects over feelings and moral judgments remain uncertain. We used journalistic news showing real-life situations to investigate the effects of facing violence over the experience of four moral emotions which represent powerful impulses for social actions in situations of suffering linked to violence:

Herrera Pérez, C., Sánchez-Escribano, M. G., & Sanz, R. (2012). The morphofunctional approach to emotion modelling in robotics. Adaptive Behavior, 20(5), 388-404. DOI: 10.1177/1059712312451604.

The social brain hypothesis (SBH) has played a prominent role in interpreting the relationship between human social, cognitive and technological evolution in archaeology and beyond. This article examines how the SBH has been applied to the Palaeolithic material record, and puts forward a critique of the approach. Informed by Material Engagement Theory (MET) and its understanding of material agency

This study aims to determine processes and procedures for the analysis of the behavior of brain signals in clinical trials before and after different intervention protocols involving transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). In this study, PubMed and Cochrane databases were searched for original articles describing clinical trials that used electroencephalography to analyze the behavior of brain

Achieving efficient and reliable self-organization in groups of autonomous robots is a fundamental challenge in swarm robotics. Even simple states of collective motion, such as group translation or rotation, require nontrivial algorithms, sensors, and actuators to be achieved in real-world scenarios. We study here the capabilities and limitations in controlling experimental robot swarms of a decentralized

Traditional typological, technical, and cognitive approaches to early stone tools have taken an implicit Cartesian stance concerning the nature of mind. In many cases, this has led to interpretations of early technology that overemphasize its human-like features. By eschewing an epistemic mediator, 4E approaches to cognition (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) are in a better position to make

Today aging of society is becoming increasingly important. Many people want to live at home as long as possible. Very often this leads to accidents at home, which are unnoticed for a long time and therefore cause severe complications. We propose a cyber-physical system consisting of sensors for motion, light, temperature, and so on, which monitors the behavior of elderly people but is non-invasive

Humans leverage material forms for unique cognitive purposes: We recruit and incorporate them into our cognitive system, exploit them to accumulate and distribute cognitive effort, and use them to recreate phenotypic change in new individuals and generations. These purposes are exemplified by writing, a relatively recent tool that has become highly adept at eliciting specific psychological and behavioral

I provide some historical perspective on the development of the “minimally cognitive behavior” research program and its relation to “minimal cognition.”

Spatial information can be valuable, but new environments may be perceived as risky and thus often evoke fear responses and risk-averse exploration strategies such as thigmotaxis or wall-following behavior. Individual differences in risk-taking (boldness) and thigmotaxis have been reported in natural taxa, which may benefit their survival. In neurorobotic, the common approach is to reproduce cognitive

The behavioural ecological approach to anthropology states that the density and distribution of resources determines optimal patterns of resource use and also sets its constraints to grouping, mobility and settlement choice. Central place foraging (CPF) models have been used for analyzing foraging behaviours of hunter-gatherers and drawing a causal link from the volume of available resources in the

This work presents an architecture that generates curiosity-driven goal-directed exploration behaviours for an image sensor of a microfarming robot. A combination of deep neural networks for offline unsupervised learning of low-dimensional features from images and of online learning of shallow neural networks representing the inverse and forward kinematics of the system have been used. The artificial

Pheromones are chemical substances released into the environment by an individual animal, which elicit stereotyped behaviours widely found across the animal kingdom. Inspired by the effective use of pheromones in social insects, pheromonal communication has been adopted to swarm robotics domain using diverse approaches such as alcohol, RFID tags and light. COSΦ is one of the light-based artificial

This article tries to offer a different perspective on the issue of what it means for some physical structure to be a representation. In the first sections, it will be shown how and why this issue is still far from settled. This will be done by emphasizing the—what I will call—metaphysically promiscuous character of representation. For although representations are typically assumed to be some sort

The free energy principle (FEP) is an information-theoretic approach to living systems. FEP characterizes life by living systems’ resistance to the second law of thermodynamics: living systems do not randomly visit the possible states, but actively work to remain within a set of viable states. In FEP, this is modelled mathematically. Yet, the status of these models is typically unclear: are these models

Swarms of various lifeforms have been observed to utilize emergent group dynamics (Eberhart et al., 2001) for various tasks such as foraging (Seeley, 1992), reproduction (Bonner, 1949; Durston, 1973), or escaping predators (Brock & Riffenburgh, 1960; Cavagna et al., 2010; Magurran & Pitcher, 1987). Seeley (1992) discovered how bees use waggle dances for foraging by pointing their hive to high-quality

This article is intended as a response to Goldinger et al. and to all those, an increasing minority in the sciences, who still belittle the contribution of embodied cognition to our understanding of human cognitive behaviour. In this article (section 1), I introduce the notion of embodiment and explain its dimensions and reach. I review (section 2) a range of embodied cognition theories and highlight

Inspired by the learning walks of the ant Ocymyrmex robustior, the original multi-snapshot model was introduced, which—in contrast to the classical “single snapshot at the goal” model—collects multiple snapshots in the vicinity of the goal location that subsequently can be used for homing, that is, for guiding the return to the goal. In this study, we show that the multi-snapshot model can be generalized

Investigating the viscoelastic mechanical coupling of a gut between the head and posterior is key to understanding the complicated movements of caterpillars. Caterpillar bodies are like a sac filled with fluid. In this article, we propose a locomotion model in which the head and posterior are connected with a spring and damper system instead of a rod; we refer to this as the “balloon model.” The numerical

In diverse situations, humans produce natural and adaptable bipedal locomotion by cooperatively manipulating the interactions among the different parts of their bodies and the environment. Therefore, to realize a robot with adaptable behavior, it should be enabled to adjust its morphology accordingly in response to environmental changes. From this perspective, this study introduces the development

Nowadays, the famous tourist attractions are becoming more and more popular for people from all over the world. Thus, to ensure the safety of tourists is a tough task in such crowded area. The study of pedestrian’s characteristics in crowd movement is essential for safety management. In this article, both uni- and bidirectional observational experiments were conducted to quantitatively analyze the

This article explores the opinion dynamics of a double coalition opinion against a third opinion under majority rule updates on odd fixed size connected groups. For this purpose, coalition benefit criteria and three opinion formation models which extend the 2-state majority rule model on lattices are introduced. The proposed models focus on the coalition profit of its constituent coalition opinions

Distance perception for mobile agents is of great importance for safe navigation in unknown environments. Traditional methods make use of analytical solutions. Yet, according to some research hypothesis, distance perception is not the result of mathematical calculations, but an emergent consequence of an association process, where visual and tactile information acquire a central role. Designing models

Although dreaming is an everyday aspect of human existence, its precise function, if any, remains uncertain. While some consider it an epiphenomenon with no proper functionality, others see dreaming as having adaptive benefits (see, for example, Zink & Pietrowsky, 2015, for 11 different structural and biological theories of dreaming, which vary greatly in the function they ascribe to dreams).

Learning to make decisions in partially observable environments is a notorious problem that requires a complex representation of controllers. In most work, the controllers are designed as a non-linear mapping from a sequence of temporal observations to actions. These problems can, in principle, be formulated as a partially observable Markov decision process whose policy can be parameterised through

Work on minimal cognition raises a variety of questions concerning the boundaries of cognition. Many discussions of minimal cognition assume that the domain of minimal cognition is a subset of the domain of the living. In this article, I consider whether non-living ‘active materials’ ought to be included as instances of minimal cognition. I argue that seeing such cases as ‘minimal models’ of (minimal)

This special issue highlights the growing interdisciplinary interest in minimal cognition, bringing together a number of philosophers and scientists interested in investigating where, how, and why cognition arises. In what follows, we introduce the topic of minimal cognition by giving a brief look at debates and discussions about the lower bounds of cognition, minimally cognitive behaviors, and the

In this article, a robust adaptive intelligent fault-tolerant controller with prescribed performance is proposed for an uncertain quadruped robot with actuator fault. The control system comprised of three terms: (1) a full-state feedback controller which includes the prescribed performance function, (2) an adaptive intelligent wavelet-based Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy network (TSFN), and (3) a robust control

The Special Issue contains the selected articles presented at the 15th International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB 2018). The conference took place during August 2018 in Frankfurt, Germany. The articles introduce different aspects of closed-loop dynamic computations for adaptive behavior in artificial agents. The aspects cover a range of adaptive behavior research from morphological

Navigating, directing, and controlling autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are demanding and considered complicated compared to the autonomous surface-level performance. In such vehicles, the motion can be controlled depending on the estimation of indefinite hydrodynamic forces and the disturbances that occurs in this vehicle in the underwater background. In this article, Gray Wolf optimization (GWO)

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) can shift neuronal membrane excitability by applying a weak slow electric current to the brain through the scalp. Attendant electroencephalography (EEG) can provide valuable information about the tDCS mechanisms. This study investigated the effects of anodal tDCS on parietal cortex and cerebellum activity to reveal possible modulation of spontaneous oscillatory

Environmental changes (e.g. food depletion and worsening climatic conditions) continuously force biological agents to evaluate a tradeoff between the optimality of the decision making, the time, and the computational load needed for making such decisions. Managing this tradeoff comes at a cost in environments in which predators are plentiful, but the computational power is scarce. One of the outcomes

In the target article, it was claimed that the enactive extended interpretation of the autopoietic theory (AT) of living beings is incorrect, and an embodied reformulation of AT (EAT) was put forward to remedy and prevent such an interpretation. In this general reply, I want to clarify the motivation, reach, philosophical commitments, and theoretical status of EAT. I do this, mainly, by explicating

Biological vision incorporates intelligent cooperation between the sensory and the motor systems, which is facilitated by the development of motor skills that help to shape visual information that is relevant to a specific vision task. In this article, we seek to explore an approach to active vision inspired by biological systems, which uses limited constraints for motor strategies through progressive

Hanczyc, M. N., Imhof, B., & Adamatzky, A. (2018). Living architecture: workshop report from the European Conference on Artificial Life, Lyon, France, 4 September 2017. Adaptive Behavior, 26, 85-88. doi:10.1177/1059712318761518

Enactive approaches to cognitive science aim to explain human cognitive processes across the board without making any appeal to internal, content-carrying representational states. A challenge to such a research programme in cognitive science that immediately arises is how to explain cognition in so-called 'representation-hungry' domains. Examples of representation-hungry domains include imagination