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Machine Experiments and Theoretical Modelling: from Cybernetic Methodology to Neuro-Robotics
No full textCybernetics promoted machine-supported investigations of adaptive sensorimotor
behaviours observed in biological systems. This methodological approach receives renewed
attention in contemporary robotics, cognitive ethology, and the cognitive neurosciences. Its
distinctive features concern machine experiments, and their role in testing behavioural
models and explanations flowing from them. Cybernetic explanations of behavioural
events, regularities, and capacities rely on multiply realizable mechanism schemata, and
strike a sensible balance between causal and unifying constraints. The multiple realizability
of cybernetic mechanism schemata paves the way to principled comparisons between
biological systems and machines. Various methodological issues involved in the transition
from mechanism schemata to their machine instantiations are addressed here, by reference
to a simple sensorimotor coordination task. These concern the proper treatment of ceteris
paribus clauses in experimental settings, the significance of running experiments with correct
but incomplete machine instantiations of mechanism schemata, and the advantage of
operating with real machines – as opposed to simulated ones – immersed in real environments
Biorobotic Experiments for the Discovery of Biological Mechanisms
No full textRobots are being extensively used for the purpose of discovering and testing empirical
hypotheses about biological sensorimotor mechanisms. We examine here methodological
problems that have to be addressed in order to design and perform “good” experiments
with these machine models. These problems notably concern the mapping
of biological mechanism descriptions into robotic mechanism descriptions; the distinction
between theoretically unconstrained “implementation details” and robotic features
that carry a modeling weight; the role of preliminary calibration experiments;
the monitoring of experimental environments for disturbing factors that affect both
modeling features and theoretically unconstrained implementation details of robots.
Various assumptions that are gradually introduced in the process of setting up and
performing these robotic experiments become integral parts of the background hypotheses
that are needed to bring experimental observations to bear on biological
mechanism descriptions
Human-robot interaction as a make-believe play|L’INTERAZIONE TRA UMANI E ROBOT COME GIOCO DI FINZIONE
No full textAn issue that is usually neglected in the literature on the attribution of mental states in human-robot interaction is the ontological commitment of users to these states. In this context, we argue the need to decouple the concept of attributing mental states from the act of uttering sentences with mentalistic content. We will perform an analysis of the different types of ontological commitment underlying the user’s utterance of a sentence with mentalistic content, in order to highlight the importance of estimating the user’s belief set for understanding the psychological dynamics of human-robot interaction. The different attitudes range from realism to eliminativism or the agnostic view, within which two positions can be distinguished: the reductionist position, which traces mentalistic statements back to beliefs about the physical state of the system, and the fictional position, according to which the user’s beliefs are true in the context of a make-believe play. In relation to the latter position, we consider a recent proposal by Clark and Fischer (2022), the so-called ‘depiction theory’, which was created to solve the social artefact puzzle, whereby, during human-robot interaction, users interact with the robot as if it were a real social agent, even though they are aware of its artefact nature. By reading the robot as a superimposition of several scenes, including the raw artefact and the depicted character, the theory not only explains the aforementioned paradox, but also presents itself as a fictional interpretation of human-robot interaction, since in this framework beliefs about the robot’s mind can be interpreted as beliefs about the depicted character’s mind. Nevertheless, other ontological attitudes can explain the social artefact puzzle, and future work is needed to determine user’s beliefs about robots’ beliefs from experimental data
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