cognitive neuroscience of action

When historian Charles Weiner found pages of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman’s notes, he saw it as a “record” of Feynman’s work. Feynman himself, however, insisted that the notes were not a record but the work itself. In Supersizing the Mind , Andy Clark argues that our thinking doesn’t happen only in our heads but that “certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body and world.” The pen and paper of Feynman’s thought are just such feedback loops, physical machinery that shape the flow of thought and enlarge the boundaries of mind. Drawing upon recent work in psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, robotics, human-computer systems, and beyond, Supersizing the Mind offers both a tour of the emerging cognitive landscape and a sustained argument in favor of a conception of mind that is extended rather than “brain-bound.” The importance of this new perspective is profound. If our minds themselves can include aspects of our social and physical environments, then the kinds of social and physical environments we create can reconfigure our minds and our capacity for thought and reason.

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The perception-action cycle is the circular flow of information that takes place between the organism and its environment in the course of a sensory-guided sequence of behaviour towards a goal. Each action causes changes in the environment that are analyzed bottom-up through the perceptual hierarchy and lead to the processing of further action, top-down through the executive hierarchy, toward motor effectors. These actions cause new changes that are analyzed and lead to new action, and so the cycle continues. The Perception-action cycle: Models, architectures and hardware book provides focused and easily accessible reviews of various aspects of the perception-action cycle. It is an unparalleled resource of information that will be an invaluable companion to anyone in constructing and developing models, algorithms and hardware implementations of autonomous machines empowered with cognitive capabilities. The book is divided into three main parts. In the first part, leading computational neuroscientists present brain-inspired models of perception, attention, cognitive control, decision making, conflict resolution and monitoring, knowledge representation and reasoning, learning and memory, planning and action, and consciousness grounded on experimental data. In the second part, architectures, algorithms, and systems with cognitive capabilities and minimal guidance from the brain, are discussed. These architectures, algorithms, and systems are inspired from the areas of cognitive science, computer vision, robotics, information theory, machine learning, computer agents and artificial intelligence. In the third part, the analysis, design and implementation of hardware systems with robust cognitive abilities from the areas of mechatronics, sensing technology, sensor fusion, smart sensor networks, control rules, controllability, stability, model/knowledge representation, and reasoning are discussed.

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This book presents biologically inspired walking machines interacting with their physical environment, and shows how the morphology and behavior control of machines can benefit from biological studies. The purpose is to develop a modular structure of neural control generating reactive behaviors of the physical walking machines, to analyze the neural mechanisms underlying them, and to demonstrate the sensor fusion technique leading to smooth switching between appropriate behaviors, like obstacle avoidance and sound tropism.

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Two related fields, the psychological and neuropsychological ones, provide an exhaustive overview of the complex issue of agency and self-agency. The cognitive and neuropsychological correlates are here considered  as two sides of the same coin, since we have the main scope to find a correspondence between the hardware (cerebral processes) and the software (cognitive processes) of the representation of agency.

All living system self-regulates, or, within any living system,there is a need of communication among the different parts of that system. This can include a unit as small as a cell, a plant, or animal, or even a more complex organism. For example, one’s systems are regulating one’s temperature: regulation is a property of the living system. Secondly, in order to act it is necessary for organisms to be able to distinguish between self and other, whatever this ability is learned or is a part of the process of action. The predominant account on explaining the sense of agency of our  actions is the ‘‘central monitoring theory” or ‘‘comparator model” that postulate a monitoring of central and peripheral signals arising as a consequence of the action execution . Moreover, the simulation theory is considered in alternative to the comparator perspective. Secondly, the contribution of body representation for agency is explored, taking into account the significance of proprioceptive feedback for self-agent attribution. Finally, the neural correlates of action and agent representation are considered in the light of new empirical results.

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This book succinctly demonstrates how the brain’s frontal lobe is specialized for directing voluntary action. Using data from monkeys, neurological patients, and normal subjects, the author presents a flow diagram of frontal lobe operations at the systems level. Topics include the various definitions of the term “voluntary” in a neuropsychological context, how the motor cortex provides a mechanism for the execution of voluntary behavioral actions, and how the premotor areas play a role in the selection of the movements to be performed. The text also shows how the prefrontal cortex is engaged when the subject has to make new voluntary decisions, and how the basal ganglia play a critical role in response learning. The author considers how, in humans, the prefrontal cortex has been refined to allow for trial-and-error decision making, and how the premotor and prefrontal areas select between verbal responses. Psychologists, neuropsychologists, and neurophysiologists will all want to read this pathbreaking book.

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Our ability to acknowledge and recognise our own identity – our ‘self’ – is a characteristic doubtless unique to humans. Where does this feeling come from? How does the combination of neurophysiological processes coupled with our interaction with the outside world construct this coherent identity? We know that our social interactions contribute via the eyes, ears etc. However, our self is not only influenced by our senses. It is also influenced by the actions we perform and those we see others perform. Our brain anticipates the effects of our own actions and simulates the actions of others. In this way, we become able to understand ourselves and to understand the actions and emotions of others. This book is the first to describe the new field of ‘Motor Cognition’ – one to which the author’s contribution has been seminal. Though motor actions have long been studied by neuroscientists and physiologists, it is only recently that scientists have considered the role of actions in building the self. How consciousness of action is part of self-consciousness, how one’s own actions determine the sense of being an agent, how actions performed by others impact on ourselves for understanding others, differentiating ourselves from them and learning from them: these questions are raised and discussed throughout the book, drawing on experimental, clinical, and theoretical bases. The advent of new neuroscience techniques, like neuroimaging and direct electrical brain stimulation, together with a renewal of behavioral methods in cognitive psychology, provide new insights into this area. Mental imagery of action, self-recognition, consciousness of actions, imitation can be objectively studied using these new tools. The results of these investigations shed light on clinical disorders in neurology, psychiatry and in neuro-development. This is a major new work that will lay down the foundations for the field of motor cognition.

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This volume presents an international group of researchers who model animal and human behavior–both simple and complex. The models presented focus on such subjects as the pattern of eating in meals and bouts, the energizing and shaping impact of reinforcers on behavior, transitive inferential reasoning, responding to a compound stimulus, avoidance and escape learning, recognition memory, category formation, generalization, the timing of adaptive responses, and chromosomes exchanging information. The chapters are united by a common interest in adaptive behavior–whether of human, animal, or artificial system–and clearly demonstrate the rich variety of ways in which this fascinating area of research can be approached.

In so doing, the book demonstrates the range of thought that qualifies as theorizing in the contemporary study of the mechanisms of adaptive behavior. It has two purposes: to bring together a very wide range of approaches in one place and to give authors space to explain how their ideas developed. Journal literature often presents fully-formed theories with no explanation of how an idea came to have the shape in which it is presented. In this volume, however, leaders in different fields provide background on the development of their ideas. Where once psychologists and a few zoologists had this field to themselves, now various types of computer scientists have added great energy to the mix.

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Humans, like other primates, are intensely social creatures. One of the major functions of our brains must be to enable us to be as skilful in social interactions as we are in our interactions with the physical world (e.g. recognising objects and grasping them). Furthermore, any differences between human brains and those of our nearest relatives, the great apes, are likely to be linked to our unique achievements in social interaction and communication rather than our motor or perceptual skills. Unique to humans is the ability to mentalise (or mind read), that is to perceive and communicate mental states, such as beliefs and desires. A key problem facing science is to uncover the biological mechanisms underlying our ability to read other minds and to show how these mechanisms evolved. To solve this problem we need to do experiments in which people (or animals) interact with one another rather than behaving in isolation. Such experiments are now being conducted in increasing numbers and many of the leading exponents of such experiments have contributed to this volume. ‘The Neuroscience of Social Interactions’ will be an important step in uncovering the biological mechanisms underlying social interactions – undoubtedly one of the major programmes for neuroscience in the 21st century.

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This volume collects together peer reviewed versions of most of the papers presented at the Ninth Neural Computation and Psychology Workshop (NCPW9), held in 2004 at the University of Plymouth (England). The conference invited submissions on neural computation models of all cognitive and psychological processes. The special theme of this year’s workshop was “Modeling of Language, Cognition and Action”. This topic had the aim to extend the conference appeal from the connectionist psychology community to leaders in neuroscience, robotics and cognitive systems design. The chapters cover the breadth of research in neural computation and psychology, with numerous papers that focus on language modeling, this year’s special theme. The book includes chapters from internationally renowned researchers in the various fields of cognitive psychology (such as Art Glenberg and Jonathan Evans) as well as computer science and robotics (such as Stefan Wermter & Stefano Nolfi).

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