Evaluating Semantic Knowledge Through a Semantic Association Task in Individuals With Dementia

Conceptual knowledge is supported by multiple semantic systems that are specialized for the analysis of different properties associated with object concepts. Various types of semantic association between concrete concepts—categorical (CA), encyclopedic (EA), functional (FA), and visual-encyclopedic (VEA) associations—were tested through a new picture-to-picture matching task (semantic association task, SAT). Forty individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD), 13 with behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (bv-FTD), 6 with primary progressive aphasia (PPA), and 37 healthy participants were tested with the SAT. Within-group comparisons highlighted a global impairment of all types of semantic association in bv-FTD individuals but a disproportionate impairment of EA and FA, with relative sparing of CA and VEA, in AD individuals. Single-case analyses detected dissociations in all dementia groups. Conceptual knowledge can be selectively impaired in various types of neurodegenerative disease on the basis of the specific cognitive process that is disrupted

Application of Mobile Code to Development of Cooperative Multirobot Systems

Multirobot systems address an increasing number of di#erent applications. However, a general assessed methodology for designing and developing the cooperation structure of these systems is still lacking. In this paper we present one of such methodologies, called dynamic agency, which is strongly based on a novel distributed production system, called DCLIPS, that acts an infrastructure for inferential code mobility. The adoption of mobile code promotes ease and flexibility in developing and managing the cooperation structure of multirobot systems

Learning by Exploration and Cooperation in Dynamic Agencies

Introduction Recent advantages of multi-agent systems (Bond et al., 1988) have taken on the challenge, proposed by Minsky (Minsky, 1985), of tackling with a multi-paradigmatic approach, embedded by a multi-agent society, namely the agency, the difficult problem of modelling the very complex phenomenology of human intelligence. From the Minsky viewpoint, the relevance of agency studies in informatics and robotics has further progressed in outlining the agency as conceptually envisioning a new type of machine, whose architecture contains the model of the cooperation among intelligent humans. Where a computer and a robot address their functionalities in artificially emulating the intelligence of a man (anthropos intelligence); the agency faces the task of artificially emulating the intelligence of several men (anthropoi intelligence), basically consisting in the cooperation, linking together by communication the intelligent behavior of single agents. The purpose of this work is to pre

Dynamic Agencies: Concepts and Applications

In the field of multiagent systems, belonging to the more general area..

Dynamic Agencies And Creative Scientific Discovery

Among the traditional two approaches to scientific discovery, which assume that scientific discovery is a totally rational or a totally irrational activity, we adopt a third intermediate approach that envisages a bipolar scientific discovery in which man and machine are synergically involved. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the mutual interaction between two interesting roles that machine plays in bipolar scientific discovery. In particular, we propose a novel machine of distributed artificial intelligence, called dynamic agency, as suitable to address the double role of supporting man and of describing the results of scientific discovery. The purpos