A Boy Scout, Toto, and a Bird

摘要

This chapter outlines some of the distinctions and suggests how they might be used to discover alternative architectures for robotics. It develops in parallel with and lends credence to similar criticisms of models of human reasoning. However, it is crucial to understand that situated robotic designs are pragmatic, emphasizing engineering convenience and new ways of building machines. Toto has an innovative design that enables it to learn the relative location of landmarks in some environment. Toto's design is consistent with and indeed motivated by the view that knowledge-level descriptions of behavior needn't be encoded in the mechanism as a map of the environment and fixed procedure for moving about. The claim of situated cognition is that perception and action arise together, dialectically forming each other. Perceiving landmarks is not retrieving past descriptions and matching against current categorizations. The situated cognition claim is that the coordination is accomplished in dogs by reactivation of past neural compositions.