In the Quest of the Missing Link

Abstract

This paper presents a generic model for a cognitive agent based on the hypothesis that the cognitive activity has three main characteristics: self-organization, evolutionary nature and history dependence. According to this model, a cognitive agent presents three levels: reactive, instinctive and cognitive. Each level, together with its lower levels, is intended to model a complete agent, each new level just increasing the behavior complexity. The generic model is instantiated into a computational architecture that integrates connectionist, evolutionary computation and symbolic approaches. In this architecture, the reactive level is an evolutionary environment where each organism is able to functionally link perceptive input -- represented by neural net outputs -- and effector control -- represented by the input to fuzzy control systems or Brooks' architectures. The instinctive level is based on an inductive learning process that optimizes the evolutionary process at the reactive level....