From Animals to Robots and Back:
reflections on hard problems in the study of cognition

Proceedings of a Symposium held in Honour of Aaron Sloman

School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham
12-13 September 2011

Introduction

In this symposium held in Aaron's honour, we looked reflectively at topics in the study of cognition that covered a large subset of Aaron's long term interests. These cover studies and thoughts about people, other animals, and robots. Both in terms of what problems they are, or could solve, what requirements there are to solve those problems, and how they might be solved in practice. The meeting brought together a range of speakers who have worked with Aaron in the past, or are working with him now.

Contents


1 Loss of Control Arising From Public Passions and Hidden Agendas.
Dean Petters
23 Acting on the world: understanding how agents represent the world to guide their action
Jackie Chappell
37 Virtual Machines: Non-Reductionist Bridges between the Functional and the Physical
Matthias Scheutz
59 What does it mean to have an architecture?
Brian Logan
77 Building for the future: Architectures for the next generation of intelligent robots
Nick Hawes
91 Combining planning and action, lessons from robots and the natural world
Jeremy Baxter
103 What vision can, can't and should do
Michael Zillich
117 The rocky road from Hume to Kant: correlations and theories in robots and animals
Jeremy Wyatt
139 Experts' productive learning from Formal Knowledge: Motive Generators and Productive Practice
Luc Beaudoin
173 From Cognitive Science to Data Mining, the First Intelligence Amplifier
Tom Khabaza
180 Modelling User Linguistic Competences for Individual and Collaborative Planning
Tim Read and Elena Barcena
198 Loop closing semantics and the origin of intentional states
Ian Wright