Dynamics, Synergetics, Autonomous Agents

Book excerpt: This volume focuses on the modeling of cognition, and brings together contributions from psychologists and researchers in the field of cognitive science. The shared platform of this work is to advocate a dynamical systems approach to cognition. Several aspects of this approach are considered here: chaos theory, artificial intelligence and Alife models, catastrophe theory and, most importantly, self-organization theory or synergetics. The application of nonlinear systems theory to cognitive science in general, and to cognitive psychology in particular, is a growing field that has gained further momentum thanks to new contributions from the science of robotics. The recent development in cognitive science towards an account of embodiment, together with the general approach of complexity theory and dynamics, will have a major impact on our psychological understanding of reasoning, thinking and behavior.