Time perception in shaping cognitive neurodynamics of artificial agents

Abstract

Recent research in cognitive systems aims to uncover important aspects of biological cognitive processes and additionally formulate design principles for implementing artificially intelligent systems. Despite the increasing amount of research efforts addressing cognitive phenomena, the issue of time perception and how it is linked to other cognitive processes remains largely unexplored.In the current paper, we make a first attempt for studying artificial time perception by means of simulated robotic experiments. Specifically, we investigate a behavioral rule switching task consisting of repeating trials with dynamic temporal duration. An evolutionary process is used to search for neuronal mechanisms accomplishing the rule switching task taking also into account its particular temporal characteristics. Our repeated simulation experiments showed that (i) time perception and ordinary cognitive processes may co-exist in the system sharing the same neural resources, and (ii) time perception dynamics bias the functionality of neural mechanisms with other cognitive responsibilities. Finally, in the current paper we make contact of the obtained results with previous brain imaging studies on time perception, and we make predictions for possible time-related dynamics in the real brain.

Integrated Intrinsic and Dedicated Representations of Time: A Computational Study Involving Robotic Agents

“…The selected time step is sufficiently small to support the interaction of the robot with the environment and additionally it is sufficiently large to reduce the computational resources required to design an artificial brain to the order of approximately one day (when running on a single computer). Similar time steps are typical for robotic simulation experiments, and have been used extensively in our previous studies on time perception (Maniadakis & Trahanias, 2012;Maniadakis et al, 2009aManiadakis et al, , 2009b. Interestingly, the duration of 100 ms is frequently assumed to correspond to the resolution of cognitive steps in our brain (Dehaene & Naccache, 2001;van de Par & Kohlrausch, 2000).…”

Temporal Cognition: A Key Ingredient of Intelligent Systems

“…Our recent works have investigated the role of environmental temporal constraints in shaping cognitive mechanisms (Maniadakis et al, 2009a , b ). It has been shown that system dynamics tend to self-organize mechanisms that consider and exploit time, in order to support the development of high-level cognitive skills (in particular, executive control, in the studies pursued).…”