Abstract
We investigate the relation between the development of reactive and cognitive capabilities. In particular we investigate whether the development of reactive capabilities prevents or promotes the development of cognitive capabilities in a population of evolving robots that have to solve a time-delay navigation task in a double T-Maze environment. Analysis of the experiments reveals that the evolving robots always select reactive strategies that rely on cognitive offloading, i.e., the possibility of acting so as to encode onto the relation between the agent and the environment the states that can be used later to regulate the agent’s behavior. The discovery of these strategies does not prevent, but rather facilitates, the development of cognitive strategies that also rely on the extraction and use of internal states. Detailed analysis of the results obtained in the different experimental conditions provides evidence that helps clarify why, contrary to expectations, reactive and cognitive strategies tend to have synergetic relationships.
Highlights
Developments in psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, robotics and philosophy have clarified that cognition cannot be studied properly without taking into sufficient account the role of the body, action and the external world [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
Instead, we focus on a developmental perspective in which the agents need to develop a certain skill to adapt to their environment and can do so by using a reactive strategy that relies on cognitive offloading, a cognitive strategy that relies on internal states, or on a hybrid strategy that relies on both
We report the results obtained in the different experimental conditions described in Section 2.2 and in additional control experiments described below that were carried out to clarify the role of cognitive offloading in the development of cognitive skills
Summary
Developments in psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, robotics and philosophy have clarified that cognition cannot be studied properly without taking into sufficient account the role of the body, action and the external world [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. In many cases the internal capabilities required are much simpler than those previously hypothesized within disembodied accounts. Baseball players do not need to estimate the trajectory of the flying ball to be intercepted through complex calculations. They can adjust their running speed so as to maintain the relative angle between their eyes and the ball constant [9]
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