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Cognitive Behavior of Humans, Animals, and Machines

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ZiF main building from the side, blooming trees, green lawn
Universität Bielefeld/P. Ottendörfer
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Graphic: A rat, a robot and a human sitting in front of a small labyrinth with cheese in it
Design: S. Adamick

Convenors

Prof. Dr. Werner Schneider (Bielefeld University, GER)

Prof. Dr. Helge Ritter (Bielefeld University, GER)

Coordinator at ZiF

Josefine Albert

josefine.albert@uni-bielefeld.de

Shiau-Chuen Chiou

shiau-chuen.chiou@uni-bielefeld.de

Cognitive Behavior of Humans, Animals, and Machines: Situation Model Perspectives

October 2019 – July 2020

Recent advances in cognitive neuroscience (CN, the combination of psychology and brain science) have given us new insights about likely core components of cognitive behavior that exhibits the striking flexibility and context-sensitivity that we see in humans and many animal species (e.g., rodents, monkeys). At the same time, progress in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, particularly through deep learning and its connection with other machine learning approaches, along with the availability of sophisticated robots, scenarios and datasets, have opened up new routes for synthesizing intelligent functions. These advances have created a strong basis for a converging and cross-disciplinary challenge: to understand how the emerging functional modules need to be connected in order to enable flexible context-sensitive behavior for both natural cognitive agents as well as for robots to live up to what we would expect from truly intelligent systems.

The ZiF Research Group – a "think tank" for AI and CN – brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers from pertinent fields to approach this challenge of cognitive behavior from the conceptual framework of situation models: a situation model details the required processes and the computational space that together connect perception and memory in the service of the current behavioral demand (task, exploration). Thus, predictions and other forms of manipulating perceptual or memory-based information are considered as key processes of situation models, allowing flexible and context-sensitive forms of action decisions, planning and learning. In order to foster a productive dialogue between research fields and disciplines we will concentrate on basic non-language mediated forms of behavior (e.g., manual manipulation, navigation, search). By the establishment of the ZiF Research Group, we plan to pursue the following research goals: Elucidating the processing architecture (representations and operations) of situation models, clarifying of how task- and exploration-driven behavioral demands interact, advancing highly-controlled experimental paradigms for studying situation models, and spelling out the scientific and societal implications of the generated insights for medicine, philosophy and technology. Four focus perspectives on situation models will guide and organize the research of the group: (1) Working memory as a central gateway for cognitive behavior (2) Situation models and efficient context-sensitive learning (3) Two-systems approaches to the control of cognitive behavior (4) Real and imagined flexible context-sensitive behavior by cognitive maps. Each of these focus perspectives highlights new questions and potential approach directions for answers to our key issues (goals) of the situation model framework. Crucially, we expect strong benefits by tackling these questions from the CN as well as from the AI side, especially when it comes to take to the claims of mutual inspiration of ideas seriously. Organization-wise, besides having fellows and associate group members present at the ZiF (between a few days and several months), two conferences and four workshops are planned.

Members

Prof. Dr. Werner Schneider
Neuro-cognitive Psychology & CITEC
Bielefeld University (GER)

Prof. Dr. Helge Ritter
CITEC & CoR-Lab & Neuroinformatics,
Bielefeld University (GER)

Moshe Bar
Leslie and Susan Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center,
Bar-Ilan University (ISR)

Tobias Bast
School of Psychology & Neuroscience@nottingham,
University of Nottingham (UK)

Oliver Brock
Robotics and Biology Laboratory,
Technische Universität Berlin (GER)

Radoslaw Martin Cichy
Department of Education and Psychology,
Freie Universität Berlin (GER)

Holk Cruse
CITEC,
Bielefeld University (GER)

Katja Fiehler
Team Perception & Action, Experimental Psychology,
Justus-Liebig University Gießen (GER)

Andrea Finke
Neuroinformatics & CITEC,
Bielefeld University (GER)

Robert Goldstone
Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences,
Indiana University (USA)

Nina Hanning
General and Experimental Psychology,
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (GER)

Tobias Heed
Biopsychology & Cognitive Neuroscience & CITEC,
Bielefeld University (GER)

Michael Herzog
Laboratory of Psychophysics,
Brain Mind Institute, EPFL (SWI)

Iring Koch
Cognitive and Experimental Psychology, Institute of Psycholoy,
RWTH Aachen (GER)

Heinrich René Liesefeld
General and Experimental Psychology,
Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich (GER)

Nick Myers
Experimental Psychology & Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity &
Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, University of Oxford (UK)

Yukie Nagai
International Research Center for Neurointelligence,
The University of Tokyo (JPN)

Klaus Oberauer
Cognitive Psychology,
University of Zurich (SWI)

Roland Pfister
Department of Psychology III,
University of Würzburg (GER)

Christian Poth
Neuro-cognitive Psychology & CITEC,
Bielefeld University (GER)

Malte Schilling
Neuroinformatics & CITEC,
Bielefeld University (GER)

Katharina Schwarz
Department of Psychology III,
University of Würzburg (GER)

David Vernon
Electrical and Computer Engineering,
Carnegie Mellon University Africa (RWA)

Iris Wiegand
Neuropsychology and Rehabilitation Psychology & Donders Centre for Cognition & Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour

Radboud University, Nijmegen (NLD)

Andrew Wikenheiser
Department of Psychology,
University of California, Los Angeles, (USA)

Tamim Asfour

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology & Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics & High Performance Humanoid Technologies, Karlsruhe, Germany

Michael Beetz
Collaborative Resaerch Centre ''Everyday Activity Science and Engineering'' (EASE)
& Institute for Artificial Intelligence, University of Bremen, Germany

Anna Belardinelli
Honda Research Institute Europe GmbH, Offenbach, Germany

Mario Botsch
Computer Graphics Group & CITEC, Bielefeld University, Germany

Peter Dayan
Computational Neuroscience, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Germany

Mark D'Esposito
Neuroscience and Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Christian Doeller
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany
& Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, NTNU, Trondheim, Norway

John Duncan
MRC Cognition and Brain Science Unit, University of Cambridge & University of Oxford, UK

Jacob Engelmann
Active Sensing, Faculty of Biology & CITEC, Bielefeld University, Germany

Mona Garvert
MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences Leipzig, Germany
& Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, University of Oxford, UK

Barbara Hammer
Machine Learning Group & CITEC, Bielefeld University, Germany

Robert Haschke
Neuroinformatics & CITEC, Bielefeld University, Germany

Herbert Jaeger
Groningen Cognitive Systems and Materials Center (CogniGron), Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands

Christoph Kayser
Department for Cognitive Neuroscience & CITEC, Bielefeld University, Germany

Johanna Kissler
Department of Psychology & CITEC, Bielefeld University, Germany

Stefan Kopp
Social Cognitive Systems Group & CITEC, Bielefeld University, Germany

Anna Maria Liesefeld
General and Experimental Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich, Germany

Thomas Martinetz
Institute for Neuro- and Biocomputing, University of Lübeck, Germany

Andrew Melnik
CITEC & Neuroinformatics, Bielefeld University, Germany

Wolfgang Prinz
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany

Charan Ranganath
Center for Neuroscience and Department of Psychology, &
Memory and Plasticity Program, University of California at Davis, USA

Giulio Sandini
Brain and Cognitive Sciences Unit, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy
& Bioengineering, University of Genova, Italy

Wolf Schäbitz
Evangelisches Klinikum Bethel (EvKB), Bielefeld, Germany,
& Academic Teaching Hospital of the University of Münster, Germany

Thomas Schack
Neurocognition and Action Research Group & CITEC, Bielefeld University, Germany

Kerstin Schill
Faculty of Computer Science and Mathematics, University of Bremen, Germany

Peter Schulte
Department of Philosophy, University of Zurich, Switzerland

Ed Vogel
Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Chicago, USA

Albrecht von Müller
Parmenides Foundation, Germany,
& Philosophy Department, LMU Munich, Germany

Sven Wachsmuth
CITEC Central Lab Facilities, Bielefeld University, Germany

Publications

  • Schneider, W. X., Albert, J., & Ritter, H. (2020). Enabling cognitive behavior of humans, animals, and machines: Situation model perspectives. ZiF-Mitteilungen, 2020(1), 21–34.
  • Vernon, D., Albert, J., Beetz, M., Chiou, S.-C., Ritter, H., & Schneider, W. X. (o. J.). Action selection and execution in everyday activities: A cognitive robotics & situation model perspective.
  • Beyvers, M. C., Koch, I., & Fiehler, K. (2021). Episodic Binding and Retrieval in Sequences of Discrete Movements – Evidence from Grasping Actions. Journal of Cognition, 5(1), 41. https://doi.org/10.5334/joc.234
  • Pollmann, S., & Schneider, W. X. (2022). Working memory and active sampling of the environment: Medial temporal contributions. In Handbook of Clinical Neurology (Vol. 187, pp. 339–357). Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-823493-8.00029-8
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