The idea that some day robots may have emotions has captured the imagination of many and has been dramatized by robots and androids in such famous movies as 2001 Space Odyssey's HAL or Star Trek's Data. By contrast, the editors of this book have assembled a panel of experts in neuroscience and artificial intelligence who have dared to tackle the issue of whether robots can have emotions from a purely scientific point of view. The study of the brain now usefully informs study of the social, communicative, adaptive, regulatory, and experimental aspects of emotion and offers...

This collection of 21 essays explores the creative interaction among the cognitive neurosciences, philosophy, and theology. It is the result of an international research conference co-sponsored by the Vatican Observatory, Rome, and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, Berkeley.

In this book, Michael Arbib, a researcher in artificial intelligence and brain theory, joins forces with Mary Hesse, a philosopher of science, to present an integrated account of how humans "construct" reality through interaction with the social and physical world around them. The book is a major expansion of the Gifford Lectures delivered by the authors at the University of Edinburgh in the autumn of 1983. The authors reconcile a theory of the individual's construction of reality as a network of schemas "in the head" with an account of the social construction of language, science, ideology,...

Mirror neurons may hold the brain's key to social interaction - each coding not only a particular action or emotion but also the recognition of that action or emotion in others. The Mirror System Hypothesis adds an evolutionary arrow to the story - from the mirror system for hand actions, shared with monkeys and chimpanzees, to the uniquely human mirror system for language. In this accessible volume, experts from child development, computer science, linguistics, neuroscience, primatology and robotics present and analyse the mirror system and show how studies of action and language can...

In this book, Michael Arbib, a researcher in artificial intelligence and brain theory, joins forces with Mary Hesse, a philosopher of science, to present an integrated account of how humans "construct" reality through interaction with the social and physical world around them. The book is a major expansion of the Gifford Lectures delivered by the authors at the University of Edinburgh in the autumn of 1983. The authors reconcile a theory of the individual's construction of reality as a network of schemas "in the head" with an account of the social construction of language, science, ideology,...

This is an exciting time. The study of neural networks is enjoying a great renaissance, both in computational neuroscience - the development of information processing models of living brains - and in neural computing - the use of neurally inspired concepts in the construction of "intelligent" machines. Thus the title of this volume, Dynamic Interactions in Neural Networks: Models and Data can be given two interpretations. We present models and data on the dynamic interactions occurring in the brain, and we also exhibit the dynamic interactions between research in computational neuroscience...

Mirror neurons may hold the brain's key to social interaction - each coding not only a particular action or emotion but also the recognition of that action or emotion in others. The Mirror System Hypothesis adds an evolutionary arrow to the story - from the mirror system for hand actions, shared with monkeys and chimpanzees, to the uniquely human mirror system for language. In this accessible volume, experts from child development, computer science, linguistics, neuroscience, primatology and robotics present and analyse the mirror system and show how studies of action and language can...

The Central Nervous System can be considered as an aggregate of neurons specialized in both the transmission and transformation of information. Information can be used for many purposes, but probably the most important one is to generate a representation of the "external" world that allows the organism to react properly to changes in its external environment. These functions range from such basic ones as detection of changes that may lead to tissue damage and eventual destruction of the organism and the implementation of avoidance reactions, to more elaborate representations of the external...

This volume integrates theory and experiment to place the study of vision within the context of the action systems which use visual information. This theme is developed by stressing: (a) The importance of situating anyone part of the brain in the context of its interactions with other parts of the brain in subserving animal behavior. The title of this volume emphasizes that visual function is to be be viewed in the context of the integrated functions of the organism. (b) Both the intrinsic interest of frog and toad as animals in which to study the neural mechanisms of visuomotor coordination,...

Various brain areas of mammals can phyletically be traced back to homologous structures in amphibians. The amphibian brain may thus be regarded as a kind of "microcosm" of the highly complex primate brain, as far as certain homologous structures, sensory functions, and assigned ballistic (pre-planned and pre-pro grammed) motor and behavioral processes are concerned. A variety of fundamental operations that underlie perception, cognition, sensorimotor transformation and its modulation appear to proceed in primate's brain in a way understandable in terms of basic principles which can be...