Background to some of the work on causation
Presented at the International Workshop on Natural and Artificial Cognition

The website on causation, by Jackie Chappell and Aaron Sloman, presupposed capabilities of animals to move around in and manipulate parts of a richly-structured 3-D world as part of the processes of learning about causal relationships and putting the resulting understanding of causal relationships to use.

The material below was provided some time after the workshop by Susannah Thorpe.
Her research on locomotion and its evolution provides some of the important detailed information about manipulation and locomotion by animals.

These and other details need to be combined with detailed specifications of the environment in order to identify the cognitive problems that have to be solved by such animals, and by future robots that are expected to perceive, move around in, learn about, and manipulate parts of a 3-D environment (the topic of two EU Cognitive Systems projects CoSy (2004-2008) and CogX (2008-2012).

We are now developing a three way collaboration (Chappell, Thorpe and Sloman) linking theories about cognitive processes with analysis of detailed requirements for manipulation and locomotion, especially in sumatran orangutans.

The presentations and papers below provide some of the background material for this collaboration.

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

Last updated: 4 Feb 2009
Installed: 4 Feb 2009