Embodiment has become an important concept in many areas of cognitive science. There are, however, very different notions of exactly what embodiment is and what kind of body is required for what kind of embodied cognition. Hence, while many would agree that humans are embodied cognizers, there is much less agreement on what kind of artefact could be considered as embodied. This paper identifies and contrasts five different notions of embodiment which can roughly be characterized as (1) structural coupling between agent and environment, (2) historical embodiment as the result of a history of structural coupling, (3) physical embodiment, (4) `organismoid' embodiment, i.e. organism-like bodily form (e.g., humanoid robots), and (5) organismic embodiment of autopoietic, living systems. 1.

This paper focuses on the environmental role in morphogenesis in dynamic morphologies (DM). We discuss the benefits of morphological plasticity (MP) and introduce our Environment-Phenotype Map (E-P Map) framework in order to investigate and classify the continual development in DMs and morphologically adaptive behaviour. We present our MP-capable system the Artificial Cytoskeleton (ArtCyto), housed within our DM the `Cellanimat', with an E-P Map closely based on MP examples from cell physiology. We provide experimental results to demonstrate that with this single E-P Map a bifurcation in morphology can occur, caused only by a di#erence in the environment, mirroring evidence from physiological data of fibroblast cell chemotaxis and macrophage cell phagocytosis.

Interactivism is a vast and rather ambitious philosophical and theoretical system originally developed by Mark Bickhard, which covers plethora of aspects related to mind and person. Within interactivism, an agent is regarded as an action system: an autonomous, selforganizing, self-maintaining entity, which can exercise actions and sense their effects in the environment it inhabits. In this paper, we will argue that it is especially suited for treatment of the problem of representation in epigenetic agents. More precisely, we will elaborate on process-based ontology for representations, and will sketch a way of discussing about architectures for epigenetic agents in a general manner.

Embodied Cognition (EC) is a comprehensive approach to, and framework for, the study of the mind. EC treats cognition as a coordinated set of tools evolved by organisms for coping with their environments. Each of the key terms in this characterization—tool, evolved, organism, coping, and environment—has a special significance for understanding the mind that is discussed in this article. Although it is typical to introduce the embodied cognition thesis with a litany of criticism of current approaches to the mind, I should like, with this article, to say publicly that I believe this method to be unnecessary and obsolete. Embodied cognition (EC) is a comprehensive approach to, and framework for, the study of the mind, and it has reached a level of maturity where it is no longer necessary to justify it with reference to the problems and oversights of some different, presumably more respectable, approach. As with any scientific paradigm, EC has a history, and the interested reader is encouraged to

Holistic evolution (the concurrent evolution of control structure and morphology) and embodied evolution (the distribution of evolutionary function into asynchronous, autonomous robots operating in a task environment offer a great deal of possibility to the field of evolutionary robotics. Both methodologies have principlistic and practical ramifications, but the most radical—and important—may lie in their confluence. This paper details the motivations behind an experimental work in progress. 1

This paper presents our approach to using semantic technologies to describe robot embodiments. We introduce a prototype implementation of RoboDB, a robot database based on semantic web technologies with the functionality necessary to store meaningful information about the robot’s body structure. We present a heuristic evaluation of the user interface to the system, and discuss the possibilities of using the semantic information gathered in the database for applications like building a robot ontology, and the development of robot middleware systems.