Contributions to
WONAC: International Workshop on Natural and Artificial Cognition

Pembroke College, Oxford
June 25 and 26, 2007

Jackie Chappell
(School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham, UK)
Aaron Sloman
(School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK)

People at the workshop

This directory provides links to our presentations at the workshop, and related documents.

The main (but not sole) emphasis of the workshop was on tool use. Since intelligent tool use involves understanding causation, we were asked to start off the workshop programme by giving two presentations (available below) on causation with reference to the altricial/precocial distinction. Expanded versions of our slide presentations are below (PDF). We are joint authors of both, though only the presenter is shown for each.

After the workshop, we extracted some of our slides to form a separate document - item 3 below, still incomplete.

1. Aaron Sloman:
   Evolution of two ways of understanding causation: Humean and Kantian. (PDF), Abstract (HTML)

2. Jackie Chappell:
   Understanding causation: the practicalities

   -- Screen version with hyperlinks (PDF)
   -- Print version without hyperlinks (PDF)
   -- Abstract (HTML)

3. Causal competences of many kinds
   (Not presented at workshop)

   After the workshop we separated out and expanded a part of the first set of slides, on what might be meant by 'understanding causation', arguing that attempting to produce a definitive operational test for whether an animal or child does or does not understand causation is misguided, since such understanding has several different facets which do not necessarily all co-occur.

   So there are different kinds of causal understanding with different information-processing requirements.
   An incomplete draft version is here:

   Causal Competences Of Many Kinds(PDF)

   NOTE: it turns out that Steven Sloman's book Causal models: How people think about the world and its alternatives
   described here is relevant to this, especially chapter 12.

   ---

4. Some previous papers and presentations referenced in our slides
   • COSY-TR-0501: Altricial self-organising information-processing systems
     April 2005 GC7 Workshop, York
     Also in AISB Quarterly, 121, Summer 2005, pp. 5--7,

   • COSY-TR-0502: The Altricial-Precocial Spectrum for Robots
     IJCAI 2005, Edinburgh. pp 1187--1192.

   • COSY-TR-0609 (PDF): Natural and artificial meta-configured altricial information-processing systems
     To appear in a special issue of International Journal of Unconventional Computing 2007

   • COSY-TR-0703 (PDF and HTML): Computational Cognitive Epigenetics
     Commentary on Jablonka and Lamb: Evolution in Four Dimensions,
     to appear in Behavioral and Brain Sciences Journal 2007

   • 'Ontology extension' in evolution and in development, in animals and machines.
     Presentation given in Birmingham (Oct 2006) and in Edinburgh (Dec 2006).

   ---

5. Some related papers and presentations (including more recent ones)
   • Presentations in the context of the Cognition and Affect project
   • Papers and presentations related to the CoSy robotic project
   • CoSy Meeting of Minds Workshop, Paris 16-18 Sept 2007,
     where where people studying insect, primate and human cognition met and talked with members of the CoSy team.
   • Presentations and other material provided after the Paris Workshop.
   • A New Approach to Philosophy of Mathematics: Design a young explorer, able to discover "toddler theorems"
     This presentation illustrates some connections between Kant's philosophy of mathematics and the ability of children, possibly some other animals, and perhaps future robots to learn things about the word empirically, then acquire an understanding that they have a mathematical necessity and can therefore be used with confidence to work out what to do or what will happen in novel situations.
     This is also closely connected with the Kantian conception of causation presented in our talks.

   ---

6. Papers and presentations on the evolution of primate capabilities
   Since the summer of 2008 we have been collaborating with Susannah Thorpe. on the cognitive challenges involved in arboreal locomotion by Sumatran orangutans. She has provided some illustrative presentations and papers as background for the material presented here.

Maintained by Aaron Sloman
School of Computer Science
The University of Birmingham -
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