Interactivist approach to representation in epigenetic agents

Interactivism is a vast and rather ambitious philosophical and theoretical system originally developed by Mark Bickhard, which covers plethora of aspects related to mind and person. Within interactivism, an agent is regarded as an action system: an autonomous, self-organizing, self-maintaining entity, which can exercise actions and sense their effects in the environment it inhabits. In this paper, we will argue that it is especially suited for treatment of the problem of representation in epigenetic agents. More precisely, we will elaborate on process-based ontology for representations, and will sketch a way of discussing about architectures for epigenetic agents in a general manner

Structures, inner values, hierarchies and stages: essentials for developmental robot architectures

In this paper we try to locate the essential components needed for a developmental robot architecture. We take the vocabulary and the main concepts from Piaget’s genetic epistemology and Vygotsky’s activity theory. After proposing an outline for a general developmental architecture, we describe the architectures that we have been developing in the recent years - Petitagé and Vygovorotsky. According to this outline, various contemporary works in autonomous agents can be classified, in an attempt to get a glimpse into the big picture and make the advances and open problems visible

Mind-prosthesis metaphor for design of human-computer interfaces that support better attention management

In this paper we investigate the issues of user attention management in the context of the changes of underlying metaphors in human-computer interface design. After the introductory part, we discuss the problems of staying focused as well as reconstructing the context of an interrupted task while working in some computer environment. We highlight the problems with current interfaces and the desktop metaphor in particular, we propose that the mind-prosthesis metaphor may be better suited for the design of future, attention aware systems, and we put forward some guidelines for interface design that follow from our analysis. 1 The work presented here builds upon our previous research on metaphors in interface design [Stojanov & Stojanoski, 2001] and attention aware systems [Roda &amp