Claude Shannon formalized the notion of information transmission rate and capacity for pre-existing channels. Wittgenstein in his later work insisted that linguistic meaning be defined in terms of use in language games. C. S. Peirce, the father of semiotics, realized the importance of sign, signified, and interpretant in processes of semiosis. In particular, the connection between sign and signified does not take place in a platonic vacuum but is situated, embodied, embedded, and must be mediated by an interpretant. We introduce a rigorous mathematical notion of meaning, as (1) agent- and observer- perceptible information in interaction games between an agent and its environment or between an agent and other agents, that is (2) useful for satisfying homeostatic and other drives, needs, goals or intentions. With this framework it is possible to address issues of sensor- and actuator- design, origins, evolution, and maintenance for biological and artificial systems. Moreover, correspondences between channels of meaning are exploited by biological entities in predicting the behavior or reading the intent of others, as in predator-prey and social interaction. Social learning, imitation, communication of experience also develop and can be developed on this substrate of shared meaning.

This position paper proposes that the study of embodied cognitive agents, such as humanoid robots, can advance our understanding of the cognitive development of complex sensorimotor, linguistic and social learning skills. This in turn will benefit the design of cognitive robots capable of learning to handle and manipulate objects and tools autonomously, to cooperate and communicate with other robots and humans, and to adapt their abilities to changing internal, environmental, and social conditions. Four key areas of research challenges are discussed, specifically for the issues related to the understanding of: (i) how agents learn and represent compositional actions; (ii) how agents learn and represent compositional lexicons; (iii) the dynamics of social interaction and learning; and (iv) how compositional action and language representations are integrated to bootstrap the cognitive system. The review of specific issues and progress in these areas is then translated into a practical roadmap based on a series of milestones. These milestones provide a possible set of cognitive robotics goals and test-scenarios, thus acting as a research roadmap for future work on cognitive developmental robotics.

Abstract — It is thought that meaning may be grounded in early childhood language learning via the physical and social interaction of the infant with those around him or her, and that the capacity to use words, phrases and their meaning are acquired through shared referential ‘inference ’ in pragmatic interactions. In order to create appropriate conditions for language learning it would therefore be necessary to expose the robot to similar physical and social contexts. However in the early stages of language learning it is estimated that a 2-year-old child can be exposed to as many as 7,000 utterances per day in varied contextual situations. In this paper we report on our forthcoming experiments which are designed to allow a robot to carry out language learning in a manner analogous to that in early child development and which effectively ‘short cuts ’ holophrase learning. Two approaches are used: simulated babbling through mechanisms which will yield basic word or holophrase structures and an interaction environment between a human and a robot where shared ‘intentional’ referencing and the associations between physical, visual and speech modalities can be experienced by the robot. The output of these experiments, combined to yield word or holophrase structures grounded in the robot’s own actions and modalities, would provide scaffolding for further proto-grammatical usagebased learning via interaction with the physical and social environment involving human feedback to bootstrap developing linguistic competencies. These structures would then form the basis for further studies on language acquisition, including the emergence of negation and more complex grammar. I.

It is generally accepted that there is something special about reasoning that uses mental images. The question of how it is special, however, has never been satisfactorily spelled out, despite over thirty years of research in the post-behaviorist tradition. This article considers some of the general motivation for the assumption that entertaining mental images involves inspecting a picture-like object. It sets out a distinction between phenomena attributable to the nature of mind, to what is called the cognitive architecture, and ones that are attributable to tacit knowledge used to simulate what would happen in a visual situation. With this distinction in mind the paper then considers in detail the widely held assumption that in some important sense images are spatially displayed or are depictive, and that examining images uses the same mechanisms that are deployed in visual perception. I argue that the assumption of the spatial or depictive nature of images is only explanatory if tak...

Contents 6. Seeing with the mind's eye 1: The puzzle of mental Imagery..6-2 6.1 What is the puzzle about mental imagery?.............................................................................................................6-2 6.2 Content, form and substance of representations ....................................................................................................6-6 6.3 What is responsible for the pattern of results obtained in imagery studies? ..............................................................6-7 6.3.1 Cognitive architecture or tacit knowledge ....................................................................................................6-7 6.3.2 Problem-solving by "mental simulation": Some additional examples ............................................................. 6-11 6.3.3 A Note concerning tacit knowledge and the criterion of cognitive penetrability.......................................... 6-20 6.3.4 Summary of so

this article (although this distinction is the subject of extensive discussion in Pylyshyn, 1984a, Chapter 7). This informal characterization and the following example will have to do for present purposes. To make this point in a more concrete way, I invented a somewhat frivolous but revealing example, involving a certain mystery box of unknown construction whose pattern of behavior has been assiduously recorded (Pylyshyn, 1984a). This box is known to emit long and short pulses with a reliable recurring pattern. The pattern (illustrated in Figure 6-1) can be described as follows: pairs of short pulses usually precede single short pulses, except when a pair of long-short pulses occurs first. In this example it turns out that the observed regularity, though completely regular when the box is in its "ecological niche," is not due to the nature of the box (to how it is constructed) but to an entirely extrinsic reason. These two sorts of "reasons" for the observed pattern (intrinsic or extrinsic) are analogous to the architecture versus tacit knowledge distinction and is crucial to understanding why the box works the way it does, as well as to why certain patterns of cognition occur. 6-9 Figure 6-1. Pattern of blips observed from a box in its typical mode of operation. The question is: Why does it exhibit this pattern of behavior? What does this behavior tell us about how it works? The reason why this particular pattern of behavior occurs in this case can only be appreciated if we know that the pulses are codes, and the pattern is due to a pattern in what they represent, in particular that the pulses represent English words spelled out in International Morse Code. The observed pattern does not reflect how the box is wired or its functional architecture -- it is due entirel...