Elena Antonova

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Elena Antonova is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of enactive cognition, humanoid robotics, and the philosophy of mind. Her work fundamentally challenges conventional approaches to artificial intelligence by arguing that true cognitive robotics must be grounded in embodied, sensorimotor experience rather than abstract computation. In her highly influential 2013 paper (18 citations), Antonova operationalizes Wittgenstein’s concept of a “form-of-life” to design interaction games where humanoid robots acquire skills and linguistic behaviors through direct, enactive engagement with humans. This work provides a powerful framework for building robots that learn not from pre-programmed data, but from lived, interactive experience. More recently, in her 2018 paper, Antonova tackles the profound question of whether a cognitive robot needs a self. Drawing on neuroscience, she dissects the human self into constituent constructs—narrative, social, somatic, and experiential—and explores how a robot’s capacity for body-mapping and social interaction could give rise to analogous, functional forms of selfhood. By bridging enactive intelligence, developmental psychology, and robotics, Antonova is charting a bold new path toward truly autonomous, socially aware machines.