Time in Consciousness, Memory and Human-Robot Interaction

Maniadakis, Michail; Trahanias, Panos

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-08864-8_2

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 53 publications

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“…Unlike the context-dependent way of perceiving time of biological beings, which is known to be responsible for adaptive behaviours, the basis for the functions of cyber-physical agents such as robots is a perfect linear clock [10]. Using temporal information in the agents' cognitive processes is considered by many researchers to be one of the milestones in achieving artificial general intelligence [11], [12]. When it comes to interacting and blending with humans, temporal information could play an even more important role than spacial information [13].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Biologically Inspired Computational Model of Time Perception

Lourenço¹,

Mattila²,

Ventura³

et al. 2022

IEEE Trans. Cogn. Dev. Syst.

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Time perception -how humans and animals perceive the passage of time -forms the basis for important cognitive skills such as decision-making, planning, and communication. In this work, we propose a framework for examining the mechanisms responsible for time perception. We first model neural time perception as a combination of two known timing sources: internal neuronal mechanisms and external (environmental) stimuli, and design a decision-making framework to replicate them. We then implement this framework in a simulated robot. We measure the agent's success on a temporal discrimination task originally conducted by mice to evaluate its capacity to exploit temporal knowledge. We conclude that the agent is able to perceive time similarly to animals when it comes to their intrinsic mechanisms of interpreting time and performing time-aware actions. Next, by analysing the behaviour of agents equipped with the framework, we propose an estimator to infer characteristics of the timing mechanisms intrinsic to the agents. In particular, we show that from their empirical action probability distribution we are able to estimate parameters used for perceiving time. Overall, our work shows promising results when it comes to drawing conclusions regarding some of the characteristics present in biological timing mechanisms.

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