Cognitive Behavior of Humans, Animals, and Machines
Cognitive Behavior of Humans, Animals, and Machines: Situation Model Perspectives
October 2019 – July 2020
Recent advances in cognitive neuroscience (CN, the combination of psychology and brain science) have given us new insights about likely core components of cognitive behavior that exhibits the striking flexibility and context-sensitivity that we see in humans and many animal species (e.g., rodents, monkeys). At the same time, progress in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, particularly through deep learning and its connection with other machine learning approaches, along with the availability of sophisticated robots, scenarios and datasets, have opened up new routes for synthesizing intelligent functions. These advances have created a strong basis for a converging and cross-disciplinary challenge: to understand how the emerging functional modules need to be connected in order to enable flexible context-sensitive behavior for both natural cognitive agents as well as for robots to live up to what we would expect from truly intelligent systems.
The ZiF Research Group – a "think tank" for AI and CN – brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers from pertinent fields to approach this challenge of cognitive behavior from the conceptual framework of situation models: a situation model details the required processes and the computational space that together connect perception and memory in the service of the current behavioral demand (task, exploration). Thus, predictions and other forms of manipulating perceptual or memory-based information are considered as key processes of situation models, allowing flexible and context-sensitive forms of action decisions, planning and learning. In order to foster a productive dialogue between research fields and disciplines we will concentrate on basic non-language mediated forms of behavior (e.g., manual manipulation, navigation, search). By the establishment of the ZiF Research Group, we plan to pursue the following research goals: Elucidating the processing architecture (representations and operations) of situation models, clarifying of how task- and exploration-driven behavioral demands interact, advancing highly-controlled experimental paradigms for studying situation models, and spelling out the scientific and societal implications of the generated insights for medicine, philosophy and technology. Four focus perspectives on situation models will guide and organize the research of the group: (1) Working memory as a central gateway for cognitive behavior (2) Situation models and efficient context-sensitive learning (3) Two-systems approaches to the control of cognitive behavior (4) Real and imagined flexible context-sensitive behavior by cognitive maps. Each of these focus perspectives highlights new questions and potential approach directions for answers to our key issues (goals) of the situation model framework. Crucially, we expect strong benefits by tackling these questions from the CN as well as from the AI side, especially when it comes to take to the claims of mutual inspiration of ideas seriously. Organization-wise, besides having fellows and associate group members present at the ZiF (between a few days and several months), two conferences and four workshops are planned.
Members
- Convenors
Prof. Dr. Helge Ritter
CITEC & CoR-Lab & Neuroinformatics,
Bielefeld University (GER)- Fellows
Katja Fiehler
Team Perception & Action, Experimental Psychology,
Justus-Liebig University Gießen (GER)Heinrich René Liesefeld
General and Experimental Psychology,
Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich (GER)Nick Myers
Experimental Psychology & Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity &
Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, University of Oxford (UK)- Associate Members
Tamim Asfour
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology & Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics & High Performance Humanoid Technologies, Karlsruhe, Germany
Michael Beetz
Collaborative Resaerch Centre ''Everyday Activity Science and Engineering'' (EASE)
& Institute for Artificial Intelligence, University of Bremen, GermanyChristian Doeller
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany
& Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, NTNU, Trondheim, NorwayJohn Duncan
MRC Cognition and Brain Science Unit, University of Cambridge & University of Oxford, UKMona Garvert
MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences Leipzig, Germany
& Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, University of Oxford, UKHerbert Jaeger
Groningen Cognitive Systems and Materials Center (CogniGron), Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The NetherlandsAnna Maria Liesefeld
General and Experimental Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich, GermanyCharan Ranganath
Center for Neuroscience and Department of Psychology, &
Memory and Plasticity Program, University of California at Davis, USAGiulio Sandini
Brain and Cognitive Sciences Unit, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy
& Bioengineering, University of Genova, Italy
Publications
- Key Publications
- Schneider, W. X., Albert, J., & Ritter, H. (2020). Enabling cognitive behavior of humans, animals, and machines: Situation model perspectives. ZiF-Mitteilungen, 2020(1), 21–34.
- Vernon, D., Albert, J., Beetz, M., Chiou, S.-C., Ritter, H., & Schneider, W. X. (o. J.). Action selection and execution in everyday activities: A cognitive robotics & situation model perspective.
- Publications
- Beyvers, M. C., Koch, I., & Fiehler, K. (2021). Episodic Binding and Retrieval in Sequences of Discrete Movements – Evidence from Grasping Actions. Journal of Cognition, 5(1), 41. https://doi.org/10.5334/joc.234
- Pollmann, S., & Schneider, W. X. (2022). Working memory and active sampling of the environment: Medial temporal contributions. In Handbook of Clinical Neurology (Vol. 187, pp. 339–357). Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-823493-8.00029-8