Towards a “Brain-Guided” Cognitive Architecture - Bioinspired Approaches for Human-Centric Technologies - page 230

through playful tasks with iCub, was in fact the main subject of this chapter. In the
discussion, we attempt to present a perspective that creative “goal-directed gener-
ation of behavior itself is navigation” (not in space but in time)!
7.5.1 Traveling in Time vs. Traveling in Space:
The Navigating Rat, a Tool-Making Crow,
and Darwin Architecture
All living organisms “navigate.” There are few exceptions like the sea squirts: after
few days of life, the first thing they do is digesting their own brains for nourishment.
But as the complexity of the body and the environments in which the species had to
survive becomes more complex, their brains also become more and more complex.
A rat navigates for food, can remember places where food is found, and finds a path
to reach it, sometimes involving novel solutions as demonstrated by several studies
on rat navigation. However, with an even more complex body and more complex
environment to survive in, higher-order primates need to navigate not only in
“space” but also in time. Evolution being always constrained by “energy and
space” would have certainly found ways to reorganize the primitive neural sub-
strates engaged in navigating in space already existing in lower-level organisms to
be reused to “navigate in time.”
Indeed the recent discovery of the default mode network of the brain (both in
humans and rats) supports this perspective. There is a wide consensus in the field of
neuroscience that the same network is consistently activated while recalling the past
(Maguire 2001 ; Rugg et al 2002 ) and other activities as diverse as simulating the
future (Atance and O'Neill 2001 ; Addis et al. 2009 ; Szpunar et al 2007 ; Schacter
et al 2012 ), spatial navigation (Burgess et al 2002 ; Suddendorf 2013 ; Corballis
2013 ), social cognition (Raichle et al 2001 ; Frith and Frith 2010 ), and perspective
taking (Mason et al 2007 ). The essence of these findings is that there is evidence in
support of the viewpoint that disparate cognitive functions often treated as distinct
might share common underlying processes.
The Darwin architecture being developed looks at the computational basis of
how such diverse functions can share resources and enable a cognitive robot to
“travel in time” (through its multiple past experiences, the present evolving experi-
ence, and the simulated future consequences) to give rise to intelligent goal-
directed behavior. In this sense, by mimicking the DMN, we have created a
computational framework that enables Darwin robot to travel in time, connect its
multiple past experiences to simulate the future, give rise to novel behaviors in
unforeseen situations, and learn new things in the process. In this context, what we
want to emphasize is that “goal-directed reasoning” is very similar to a path-finding
exercise during spatial navigation, but now in “time” not “space.”
Let us consider this analogy in detail in the context of this chapter. Goals are
distant events in time that have to be reached; past experiences triggered by one's