Practopoiesis: Or how life fosters a mind

The mind is a biological phenomenon. Thus, biological principles of organization should also be the principles underlying mental operations. Practopoiesis states that the key for achieving intelligence through adaptation is an arrangement in which mechanisms laying a lower level of organization, by their operations and interaction with the environment, enable creation of mechanisms lying at a higher level of organization. When such an organizational advance of a system occurs, it is called a traverse. A case of traverse is when plasticity mechanisms (at a lower level of organization), by their operations, create a neural network anatomy (at a higher level of organization). Another case is the actual production of behavior by that network, whereby the mechanisms of neuronal activity operate to create motor actions. Practopoietic theory explains why the adaptability of a system increases with each increase in the number of traverses. With a larger number of traverses, a system can be relatively small and yet, produce a higher degree of adaptive/intelligent behavior than a system with a lower number of traverses. The present analyses indicate that the two well-known traverses-neural plasticity and neural activity-are not sufficient to explain human mental capabilities. At least one additional traverse is needed, which is named anapoiesis for its contribution in reconstructing knowledge e.g., from long-term memory into working memory. The conclusions bear implications for brain theory, the mind-body explanatory gap, and developments of artificial intelligence technologies.Comment: Revised version in response to reviewer comment

Social robots for older users: a possibility to support assessment and social interventions

In the last decades, various researches in the field of robotics have created numerous opportunities for innovative support of the older population. The goal of this work was to review and highlight how social robots can help the daily life of older people, and be useful also as assessment tools. We will underline the aspects of usability and acceptability of robotic supports in the psychosocial work with older persons. The actual usability of the system influences the perception of the ease of use only when the user has no or low experience, while expert users’ perception is related to their attitude towards the robot. This finding should be more deeply analysed because it may have a strong influence on the design of future interfaces for elderly-robot interaction. Robots can play an important role to tackle the societal challenge of the growing older population. The authors report some recent studies with older users, where it was demonstrated that the acceptability of robotics during daily life activities, and also in cognitive evaluation, could be supported by social robot