COGNITIVE SCIENCE IN VIRTUAL WORLDS

Learning, memory, and cognition in virtual worlds

Designing learning for artificial agents: Transferring kinaesthetic learners’ procedural skills in virtual environments to embodied artificial intelligent agents

Research Focus

Synopsis

Human Memory Atkinson-Shiffrin model

A taxonomy of mammalian long-term memory systems (1980 – present)

Squire, L.R. Memory and Brain, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Going to the Pizza Shop

History of implicit memory

Descartes (1649), Maine de Biran (1804)

Implicit memory is based on implicit learning. It is an unconscious, non intentional form of memory that is expressed through performance rather than recollection

In our every day language we refer to explicit memory not implicit

Motor Skills Learning

Learning how to ride a bike

Where is it?

Cognitive Architecture Definition

A Cognitive Architecture specifies the underlying infrastructure of an intelligent systems

The short-term and long term memory that store content about the agent’s belief, goals and knowledge

The representation and organization of structures that are embedded in these memories

The functional process that operate on these structures (performance and learning mechanisms)

A programming language that lets one construct knowledge-based systems which embody the architecture’s assumptions.

Cognitive Architecture Taxonomy

Symbolic Architecture

Symbolic AI: the hypothesis that

all intelligent thoughts are

symbolic manipulation.

Symbolic Processor

Emergent Architecture

Based on Subsymbolic artificial intelligence

Used as a metaphor of the human brain, where cognitive

activities of the brain are interpreted by

theoretical concepts that have their origin

in neuroscience

Subsymbolic network

Hybrid Architecture

Comparison of Cognitive architectures

Key Design Properties for Cognitive Architectures

Soar (Symbolic)

Investigating transfer learning in the urban combat testbed.

Integrating soar with a real-time strategy game

Efficiently implementing episodic memory.

Interface Application

Memory structure in Soar

OpenCog Prime (Hybrid)

Intelligent virtual agents for MMOGs, serious games and training simulations.

Some natural language applications

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

Interface Application

OpenCog Prime Memory

Paradigm for Implicit Learning

Artificial Grammar LearningSerial Reaction TimeDynamic System Control

Sequence LearningThe Serial Reaction Time Task

The task requires learning a sequence of motor responses to visual clues

The dependent measure is reaction time

Implicit Learning and Motor Learning

Why Cognitive Science in Virtual Worlds?

Human interacting via the virtual world and run the experiment with the avatar pushing the buttons, adding an extra Layer?

Too complex to design such a test in a Virtual World (Kinematics? Latencies?)

What hypothesis? Run a comparative study?

Cognitive relationship between a human user and his or her on-line representation, Embodiment

Gardner Multiple Intelligence theory (1993)

Which World?

How to bridge link from experimental results to an AI agent?

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