Towards a “Brain-Guided” Cognitive Architecture - Bioinspired Approaches for Human-Centric Technologies - page 216

robotics in comparison to the concept of embodiment. These are not the same
things. If you have a body schema, you also have embodiment but not the other
way around. Vernon et al. ( 2010 ) in their discussion on a roadmap for cognitive
development in humanoid robots present a catalogue of cognitive architectures,
but in none of them the concept of body schema is a key element. However,
emerging trends in neuroscience act as a motivating force to revisit old ideas like
synergy formation, EPH, and body schema and reuse them in a larger context to
arrive at a shared computational/neural basis for “execution, imagination, and
understanding” of action in humans and humanoids.
2. Simulation of perception and distributed organization of semantic memory
Imagining to perceive something is similar to actually perceive it, only differ-
ence being that the perceptual activity is generated top-down rather than by
environmental stimuli. While this perspective has been emphasized in the
reviews of Hesslow ( 2002 , 2007) and Grush ( 2004 ), among others, more recent
developments on the organization of semantic knowledge in the brain (see
Patterson et al. 2007 ; Martin 2007 , 2009 ; Martin et al. 2011 ; Damasio 2010 )
provide further insights that help to constrain computational architectures for
cognitive agents. The main finding from these studies is that conceptual infor-
mation is grounded in a distributed fashion in “property-specific” cortical net-
works that directly support perception and action. It is also established that
“retrieval” or reactivation of the neural representation can be triggered from
partial cues coming from multiple modalities: for example, the sound of a
hammer retro-activates its shape representation (Meyer and Damasio 2009 ),
and presentation of a real object or a 2D picture of it can both activate the
complete network associated with the object. The results indicate that while
there is a fine level of “functional segregation” in the higher-level cortical areas
processing sensorimotor information, there is also an underlying cortical dynam-
ics that facilitates cross-modal, top-down, and bottom-up activation of these
areas. “Higher level” needs to be emphasized because there is reason to believe
that both early stages of perception and late stages of action should not be
involved in embodied simulation of action and perception, in order to keep a
distinction between overt and covert actions, which we deem important for
purposive reasoning: there is evidence of this distinction both from motor
(Desmurget and Sirigu 2009 ) and perceptual studies (Martin 2009 ).
3. Global integration through small world organization From a computational
perspective, in a large-scale complex system like the brain, efficient integrative
mechanisms require a number of organizational properties, such as minimization
of the number of processing steps, efficient wiring for minimizing brain volumes
and metabolic cost in the transmission of information, and synchronization of
neural processes in order to achieve pattern completion and conflict resolution.
Recent developments in the fields of network theory (Barab´si 2012 , 2003 ) and
connectomics (Sporns 2013 ) provide useful insights in this direction. The point
of intersection is the property of “small worldness” now found to be prevalent in
many large-scale networks. In simple terms, “small worlds” are complex sys-
tems where individual members

form tightly knit local communities,