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

In this paper, the role of adaptive group cohesion in a cooperative multi-agent source localization problem is investigated. A distributed source localization algorithm is presented for a homogeneous team of simple agents. An agent uses a single sensor to sense the gradient and two sensors to sense its neighbors. The algorithm is a set of individualistic and social behaviors where the individualistic

We present a robot architecture and experiments to investigate some of the roles that pleasure plays in the decision making (action selection) process of an autonomous robot that must survive in its environment. We have conducted three sets of experiments to assess the effect of different types of pleasure-related versus unrelated to the satisfaction of physiological needs-under different environmental

A robot capable of understanding emotion expressions can increase its own capability of solving problems by using emotion expressions as part of its own decision-making, in a similar way to humans. Evidence shows that the perception of human interaction starts with an innate perception mechanism, where the interaction between different entities is perceived and categorized into two very clear directions:

Consensus formation is investigated for multi-agent systems in which agents' beliefs are both vague and uncertain. Vagueness is represented by a third truth state meaning borderline. This is combined with a probabilistic model of uncertainty. A belief combination operator is then proposed, which exploits borderline truth values to enable agents with conflicting beliefs to reach a compromise. A number

A stimulus is a reliable signal of an outcome when the probability that the outcome occurs in its presence is different from in its absence. Reliable signals of important outcomes are responsible for triggering critical anticipatory or preparatory behavior, which is any form of behavior that prepares the organism to receive a biologically significant event. Previous research has shown that humans and

The Iterated Classification Game (ICG) combines the Classification Game with the Iterated Learning Model (ILM) to create a more realistic model of the cultural transmission of language through generations. It includes both learning from parents and learning from peers. Further, it eliminates some of the chief criticisms of the ILM: that it does not study grounded languages, that it does not include