Computational grounded cognition

From this article, which first describes the progress in grounded cognition theories, then goes into how this should be applied to robotics and artificial intelligence. Some excepts:

"Grounded theories assume that there is no central module for cognition. According to this view, all cognitive phenomena, including those considered the province of amodal cognition such as reasoning, numeric, and language processing, are ultimately grounded in (and emerge from) a variety of bodily, affective, perceptual, and motor processes. The development and expression of cognition is constrained by the embodiment of cognitive agents and various contextual factors (physical and social) in which they are immersed. The grounded framework has received numerous empirical confirmations. Still, there are very few explicit computational models that implement grounding in sensory, motor and affective processes as intrinsic to cognition, and demonstrate that grounded theories can mechanistically implement higher cognitive abilities. We propose a new alliance between grounded cognition and computational modeling toward a novel multidisciplinary enterprise: Computational Grounded Cognition. We clarify the defining features of this novel approach and emphasize the importance of using the methodology of Cognitive Robotics, which permits simultaneous consideration of multiple aspects of grounding, embodiment, and situatedness, showing how they constrain the development and expression of cognition."


"According to grounded theories, cognition is supported by modal representations and associated mechanisms for their processing (e.g., situated simulations), rather than amodal representations, transductions, and abstract rule systems. Recent computational models of sensory processing can be used to study the grounding of internal representations in sensorimotor modalities; for example, generative models show that useful representations can self-organize through unsupervised learning (Hinton, 2007). However, modalities are usually not isolated but form integrated and multimodal assemblies, plausibly in association areas or 'convergence zones'" (Damasio, 1989; Simmons and Barsalou, 2003).

"An important challenge is explaining how abstract concepts and symbolic capabilities can be constructed from grounded categorical representations, situated simulations and embodied processes. It has been suggested that abstract concepts could be based principally on interoceptive, meta-cognitive and affective states (Barsalou, 2008) and that selective attention and categorical memory integration are essential for creating a symbolic system" (Barsalou, 2003).