Representational content and the reciprocal interplay of agent and environment

Declarative modelling approaches in principle assume a notion of representation or representational content for the modelling concepts. The notion of representational content as discussed in literature in cognitive science and philosophy of mind shows complications as soon as agent and environment have an intense reciprocal interaction. In such cases an internal agent state is affected by the way in which internal and external aspects are interwoven during (ongoing) interaction. In this paper it is shown that the classical correlational approach to representational content is not applicable, but the temporalinteractivist approach is. As this approach involves more complex temporal relationships, formalisation was used to define specifications of the representational content more precisely. These specifications have been validated by automatically checking them on traces generated by a simulation model. Moreover, by mathematical proof it was shown how these specifications are entailed by the basic local properties.

[1]  Wamberto Weber Vasconcelos,et al.  Norm Verification and Analysis of Electronic Institutions , 2004, DALT.

[2]  Ron Sun,et al.  Duality of the Mind , 2002 .

[3]  A. Clark.  Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again , 1996 .

[4]  Catholijn M. Jonker,et al.  Compositional Verification of Multi-Agent Systems: A Formal Analysis of Pro-activeness and Reactiveness , 1997, Int. J. Cooperative Inf. Syst..

[5]  Christopher D. Walton,et al.  Model Checking Agent Dialogues , 2004, DALT.

[6]  C. R. Ramakrishnan,et al.  Modeling and Verification of Distributed Autonomous Agents Using Logic Programming , 2004, DALT.

[7]  Abhaya C. Nayak,et al.  Theories of Intentions in the Framework of Situation Calculus , 2004, DALT.

[8]  R. Sun.  Symbol Grounding: A New Look At An Old Idea , 1999 .

[9]  Jan Treur,et al.  BDI-Modelling of Intracellular Dynamics , 2002 .

[10]  Catholijn M. Jonker,et al.  A temporal-interactivist perspective on the dynamics of mental states , 2003, Cognitive Systems Research.

[11]  Catholijn M. Jonker,et al.  A temporal modelling environment for internally grounded beliefs, desires and intentions , 2003, Cognitive Systems Research.

[12]  Tibor Bosse,et al.  Representational Content and the Reciprocal Interplay of Agent and Environment , 2004, DALT.

[13]  Mark H. Bickhard,et al.  Representational content in humans and machines , 1993, J. Exp. Theor. Artif. Intell..

[14]  Raymond Reiter,et al.  Knowledge in Action: Logical Foundations for Specifying and Implementing Dynamical Systems , 2001 .

[15]  Moshe Y. Vardi.  Branching vs. Linear Time: Final Showdown , 2001, TACAS.

[16]  Catholijn M. Jonker,et al.  A dynamic perspective on an agent's mental states and interaction with its environment , 2002, AAMAS '02.

[17]  Fred Keijzer,et al.  Representation in dynamical and embodied cognition , 2002, Cognitive Systems Research.