A BIOLOGICALLY INSPIRED APPROACH TOWARD AUTONOMOUS REAL-WORLD ROBOTS - Complex Systems Science in Biomedicine - page 802

These ideas differ quite radically from the traditional approach that de-
scribes a cognitive process as an abstract information-processing task where the
real physical connections to the outside world are of only subcritical importance,
sometimes discarded as mere "informational encapsulated plug-ins" (17). Thus,
most theories in cognitive psychology have tried to describe the process of hu-
man thinking in terms of propositional knowledge. At the same time, artificial
intelligence research has been dominated by methods of abstract symbolic proc-
essing, even if researchers often used robotic systems to implement them (18).
Ignoring sensorimotor influences on cognitive ability is in sharp contrast to
research by William James (19) and others (see (20) for a review) that describe
theories of cognition based on motor acts, or a theory of cognitive function
emerging from seminal research on sensor-motor abilities by Jean Piaget (see
(16)) and the theory of affordances by Gibson (21). In the 1980s the linguist
Lakoff and the philosopher Johnson (22) put forward the idea of abstract con-
cepts based on metaphors for bodily, physical concepts; around the same time,
Brooks made a major impact on artificial intelligence research by his concepts
of behavior-based robotics and interaction with the environment without internal
representation instead of the sense-reason-act cycle. This approach has gained
wide attention ever since, and there appears to be a growing sense of commit-
ment to the idea that cognitive ability in a system (natural or artificial) has to be
studied in the context of its relation to a "kinematically competent" physical
body.
In the future of this project, we will focus our attention on experimenting
with the robot to tackle two main questions. First, can "cognitive workload" be
offloaded to the environment by tacking into account combined, sensorimotor
representations of a robot with a kinematically complex body that have a high
disposition to manipulate and interact with the world? Second, can cognitive
mechanisms (perception/memory etc.) be better understood (or modeled in tech-
nical systems) if they are studied in the light of their ultimate contribution to
appropriate, or goal-achieving behavior of a kinematically complex body (robot)
that acts in a complex, dynamic environment.

6.

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