Prof. Rolf Pfeifer (Zürich, Switzerland)

Embodied cognition – the interaction of brain, body (morphology, materials), and environment
(This lecture will be conceptual, i.e. non-technical, targeted at an interdisciplinary audience from different backgrounds such as computer science, engineering, neuroscience, biology, psychology, and cognitive science)
Traditionally, in robotics, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience, there has been a focus on the study of the control or the neural system itself. Recently there has been an increasing interest into the notion of embodiment in all disciplines dealing with intelligent behavior, including psychology, philosophy, and linguistics (the title of this conference supports this trend). While embodiment has often been used in its trivial meaning, i.e. „intelligence requires a body“, there are deeper and more important consequences, i.e. cognition as emergent from the interaction of brain, body, and environment, or more generally from the relation between physical and information (neural, control) processes. It can be shown that through the embodied interaction with the environment, in particular through sensory-motor coordination, information structure is induced in the sensory data, thus facilitating categorization, perception and learning. I conclude with some speculations about potential lessons for robotics and cognitive science. The ideas will all be illustrated with case studies from biology -- humans and animals -- and robotics.

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11.08.2009/cb