Toward embodied artificial cognition: TIME is on my side

From the moment of birth, humans and animals are immersed in time: all experiences and actions evolve in time and are dynamically structured. The perception of time is thus a capacity indispensable for the control of perception, cognition and action. The last 10 years have witnessed a remarkable resurgence of interest in timing and time perception, with a continuously increasing number of researchers exploring these temporal abilities. However, existing robotic systems largely neglect the key role of time in cognition and action. This is a major barrier for accomplishing the long-term goal of symbiotic human-robot interaction. The critical question is: how is time instantiated in a biological system and how can it be implemented in an artificial system? Recent years have seen an increasing focus on the relationship between embodiment, affective states and the subjective experience of time. In particular, the influence of affective states on subjective time seems to depend on the embodiment of emotions. As a result, intertwined affective and interoceptive states probably contribute to our subjective experience of time. Since robotic systems are in essence embodied information-processing systems that interact with the real world, we hope to inspire a reciprocal exchange of ideas between the field of Robotics, Cognitive Neurosciences, and Psychology. The present Research Topic aims at paving the way for a new generation of intelligent computational systems that incorporate the sense of time in their processing loop and thus accomplish more efficient and more advanced cognitive capacities. Along this line, the development of robots which can sense the passage of time will significantly improve human-robot interaction particularly in natural tasks that require knowledge of and sensitivity to temporal factors. In this research topic, we have called researchers from different disciplines (Psychology, Robotics, and Neuroscience) to present their empirical work, their models or reviews on the question of how time judgments are instantiated in biological and artificial systems. Of particular interest were papers on time perception in humans and animals—with a focused interest on embodied time perception—as well as papers discussing the key role of time on different aspects of robotic cognition and the neural underpinnings of timing related phenomena. In the following, we organized the contributing articles into three categories: (1) psychology and embodied cognition, (2) robotics, and (3) neural underpinnings. First of all, we want to specifically point to the contributing article (Maniadakis and Trahanias, 2014) which provides a broad theoretical overview on the multitude of aspects of how time affects cognition. We suggest consulting this article prior to delving into the other articles in this research topic.