The role of the predicted present in artificial and natural cognitive systems

Diamond, Alan, Holland, Owen and Margues, Hugo (2011) The role of the predicted present in artificial and natural cognitive systems. In: Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures 2011 - Proceedings of the Second Annual Meeting of the BICA Society, Arlington, VA.

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Abstract

In previous work, we have argued that a sophisticated cognitive system with a complex body must possess configurable models of itself (or at least its body) and the world, along with the necessary infrastructure to use the modelled interactions between these two components to select relatively advantageous actions. These models may be used to generate representations of the future (imagination) and the past (episodic memory). In this paper we will explore some problems surrounding the representation of the present arising from the use of such models in the artificial cognitive system under development within the ECCEROBOT project. There are two aspects to consider: the representation of the state of the robot's body within the self model, and the representation of the state of the external world within the world model. In both natural and robotic systems, the processing of the sensory data carrying state information takes a considerable time, and so any estimates of the present states of both the agent and the world would have to be obtained by using predictive models. However, it appears that there is no need for any such representations to be generated in the course of selecting a course of action using self and world models, since representations are only of the future or the past. This may call into question the utility and timing of the apparent perception of the present in humans.

Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Schools and Departments: School of Engineering and Informatics > Informatics
Depositing User: Owen Holland
Date Deposited: 06 Feb 2012 18:20
Last Modified: 12 Apr 2012 09:03
URI: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/15880
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