Advanced Robotics | Special Section on Cognitive Development and Symbol Emergence

Scope

Humans develop their cognitive systems through physical and social interactions with their environment. They also organize symbol systems, including language, that enable communication and cooperation with others. These two processes are referred to as cognitive development and symbol emergence, respectively. Modeling and understanding these phenomena using a constructive/synthetic approach is important not only for developing lifelong learning autonomous robots, i.e., embodied artificial general intelligence, but also for understanding human cognitive systems. Despite the remarkable progress in AI and robotics, there is still considerable room for contributions in this area.

This section aims to elucidate the interrelated processes of cognitive development and symbol emergence in robotics. By providing a platform for interdisciplinary research exchange, we aim to advance the field of cognitive robotics and deepen our understanding of human cognition and symbolic representation.

Cognitive development involves the process of adaptation of robots’ cognitive abilities over time, including learning from interactions. Symbol emergence focuses on the creation of symbols and symbolic systems through robots’ interactions with their environment, addressing the need for meaningful, grounded symbols for communication and reasoning.

We invite contributions from a variety of disciplines, including robotics, AI, cognitive science, developmental psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience. By fostering interdisciplinary dialogue, we aim to push the boundaries of cognitive development and symbol emergence to advance the creation of intelligent, adaptive, and human-like robotic systems.

Keywords

• Cognitive Development,
• Cognitive Robotics,
• Developmental Robotics,
• Cognitive and Developmental Systems,
• Symbol Emergence,
• Symbol Grounding,
• Symbolic Representation,
• Symbolic Systems,
• Language Acquisition,
• Embodied Cognition,
• Sensorimotor/Multimodal Learning,
• Human-like Cognitive Systems,
• Social Interaction,
• Human-Robot Interaction,
• Symbolic Interaction,
• Lifelong/Open-ended Learning,
• Intrinsic Motivation,
• Machine Learning,
• Deep Learning,
• Representation Learning,
• Predictive Coding,
• Free-Energy Principle,
• Active Inference and Exploration,
• World Models,
• Probabilistic Generative Models,
• Neuro/Brain-Inspired Cognitive Systems

Submission Instructions

Details of types of the papers: Full paper (up to around 6000 words), Short paper (up to around 3500 words), and Survey paper (up to around 12000 words).

Select the type of paper from “Research Article” (Full Paper), “ Short Paper”, or “ Survey Paper” when submitting your paper to Submission Portal.

Select “[SS] Cognitive Development and Symbol Emergence” when submitting your paper to Submission Portal.

Manuscript template is available at the WEB site of Advanced Robotics (https://www.rsj.or.jp/pub/ar/submission.html).

Accepted papers are to be published in the latest issue of Advanced Robotics regular issue and compiled as one of the on-line special issues “Article Collection” in Taylor and Francis WEB site.

Source and more information: https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/special-section-on-cognitive-development-and-symbol-emergence/