Introducing Sensory-motor Apparatus in Neuropsychological Modelization

Mainstream modeling of neuropsychological phenomena has mainly been focused to reproduce their neural substrate whereas sensorymotor contingencies have attracted less attention. In this study we trained artificial embodied neural agents equipped with a pan/tilt camera, provided with different neural and motor capabilities, to solve a well known neuropsychological test: the cancellation task. Results showed that embodied agents provided with additional motor capabilities (a zooming motor) outperformed simple pan/tilt agents, even those equipped with more complex neural controllers. We concluded that the sole neural computational power cannot explain the (artificial) cognition which emerged throughout the adaptive process.