Events & News
Cog Sci Brown Bag Seminar
| Category | Lecture |
| Date | Friday, November 13, 2009 |
| Time | 12:00 pm |
| Location | GS 906 |
| Speaker | Randall Beer |
| Title | Professor of Informatics - Cognitive Science, Computer Science |
| Affiliation | School of Informatics and Computing Indiana University-Bloomington |
Evolution and Analysis of Minimally-Cognitive Behavior in Model Agents
ABSTRACT: Interest in a situated, embodied, and dynamical perspective on behavior and cognition is steadily growing. However, the conceptual foundations of this approach, as well as the theoretical tools necessary to understand the resulting brain-body-environment systems, are in their infancy. For this reason, we have been exploring the evolution and analysis of model agents exhibiting minimally cognitive behavior. In this talk, I will briefly describe a series of experiments on the evolution of visually-guided behavior, including orientation, catching, perception of passability, object categorization, relational categorization, short-term memory, and selective attention. Then I will describe in more detail recent work on the evolution of relational communication. Our model is loosely based on the waggle dance of honey bees, through which a returning forager bee communicates the direction and distance to a resource to its hive mates. Finally, if time permits, I will also provide a brief overview of our efforts to understand the model brain-body-environment systems that we evolve using the tools of dynamical systems theory.