The evolution and analysis of action switching in embodied agents

The dynamical systems approach in the cognitive and behavioral sciences studies how systems made of many coupled components across brain, body, and environment self-organize to generate behavior. This approach has mostly focused on models of single actions and has not addressed how a dynamical system can engage in multiple different directed actions. In this paper, we introduce a family of artificial life models that demonstrate how dynamical agents can engage in multiple different actions and autonomously switch between them. These described agents engage in a food foraging task, and are driven by both internal, metabolic variables and external, sensory variables. The analysis of one of these agents demonstrates how different actions can arise through transient modes of sensorimotor coordination, in which a subset of the available sensors and effectors become engaged while others are ignored. Transitions between actions are analyzed and shown to correspond to rapid movements through the agent’s state space. In these transitions, some of the previously controlling sensors and effectors disengage, and new sets of sensors and effectors are engaged.