Building and Understanding the Minimal Self.
Frontiers in psychology January 1, 2021 Valentin Forch, Fred H Hamker 5 citations
Two research movements—cognitive science and cognitive robotics—pursue different agendas in studying the minimal self. Cognitive science creates abstract models that predict human experimental data, while cognitive robotics builds embodied learning machines that develop a self from scratch, like human infants. Although both approaches can produce causal mechanistic models, building a minimal self in a robot is not the same as understanding the human minimal self. Conclusions drawn from robotic models about humans, or vice versa, require caution. Incorporating constraints from multiple levels of analysis is essential for models that predict, generate, and causally explain real-world behavior.