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A simple recurrent network with a perceptual simulation layer was trained on a corpus of affirmative and negated sentences. Linguistic negation can be encoded by the network via the inclusion (or absence) of features and categories associated with the senses, in one step, without the need for an explicit logical operation or for treating the negating word any differently than any other words. Visualizing negation as a trajectory in perceptual simulation space is explored in detail, and the implications for artificial intelligence, embodied computational models, and more practical implications of everyday use of negations are discussed.

A humanoid robot is a particular form of embodied agent. The form that an agent takes has a major impact on how that agent interacts with its environment and how it develops an understanding of that environment through its interactions. In this paper, we explore the importance of humanoid embodiment and we argue that humanoids occupy a special niche in the spectrum of robot forms. In doing so, we highlight the implications for the way a humanoid robot can interact with its environment, including humans, for the manner in which humans interact with humanoid robots, and for a humanoid robot’s capacity to develop cognitive abilities. We also consider the degree to which humanoid robots should approximate humans, addressing robot morphology, appearance, and movement. We emphasize the dual role of humanoid robots as engineering artifacts that can provide services for humans, and as platforms for scientific enquiry into the nature of human cognition. We conclude by highlighting some key research challenges for the discipline of humanoid robotics.

Following a brief review of Shanahan's so many, and so important, contributions to global workspace theory, as presented in his Embodiment and the Inner Life, we attempt to interpret, and flesh out, Shanahan's top-down account of GWT from a bottom-up perspective guided by our LIDA model of consciousness and cognition.

As a reaction to the growing economical, ecological and societal demands on education innumerous efforts and programs have been initiated throughout the educational chain to improve the quality of teaching and learning in the STEM field. On that background we sketch a framework to foster creative engagement in learning to promote scientific inquiry and modeling processes. In the theoretical part the article presents a dualistic perspective on the grounding of creative cognition in concrete experience, highlighting the productive and reflexive interplay of procedural and conceptual knowing. Their entanglement is pivotal to successful knowledge construction and application in science and technology. The ‘mechanics’ of creativity is elaborated exemplarily in a project based learning sequence that starts from investigating and modeling elastic forces as a basic paradigm of creative model construction. The creative part refers to conceptual expansions of the elastic spring model that assist in modeling emergent mechanical properties in hard and soft condensed matter. With additional moderate instructional input this knowledge is productive in creating basic models of the self-organized dynamics of biomolecular systems that orchestrate life at the cellular level. The sequence demonstrates how the interplay of hands-on experience and conceptual modeling can promote near and far transfer.

A body schema is an agent’s model of its own body that enables it to act on affordances in the environment. This paper presents a body schema system for the Learning Intelligent Decision Agent (LIDA) cognitive architecture. LIDA is a conceptual and computational implementation of Global Workspace Theory, also integrating other theories from neuroscience and psychology. This paper contends that the ‘body schema’ should be split into three separate functions based on the functional role of consciousness in Global Workspace Theory. There is (1) an online model of the agent’s effectors and effector variables (Current Body Schema), (2) a long-term, recognitional storage of embodied capacities for action and affordances (Habitual Body Schema), and (3) “dorsal” stream information feeding directly from early perception to sensorimotor processes (Online Body Schema). This paper then discusses how the LIDA model of the body schema explains several experiments in psychology and ethology.