Anticipation and Future-Oriented Capabilities in Natural and Artificial Cognition

Empirical evidence indicates that anticipatory representations grounded in the sensorimotor neural apparatus are crucially involved in several low and high level cognitive functions, including attention, motor control, planning, and goal-oriented behavior. A unitary theoretical framework is emerging that emphasizes how simulative capabilities enable social abilities, too, including joint attention, imitation, perspective taking and communication. We argue that anticipation will be a key element for bootstrapping high level cognitive functions in cognitive robotics, too. We thus propose the challenge of understanding how anticipatory representations, that serve for coordinating with the future and not only with the present, develop in situated agents.