Welcome to the proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB 2008). A symbolic creature in the SAB 2008 poster is based on GAKUTENSOKU, Japan's first modern robot created in 1928 by Makoto Nishimura. The robot, Gakutensoku (or "learning from natural law"), "was 7' 8'' tall, painted gold, could open and close its eyes, could smile, could puff out its cheeks, and at the beginning of each performance would touch its mace to its head and then begin to write (from http: //www. robmacdougall. org/index. php/2008/04/gakutensoku/). " Gakutensoku was actuated by pneumatics and seems to have been "a sort of early Japanese animatronics. " Designed 80 years ago, it still stimulates researchers' minds. This year, we received 110 submissions, among which we selected 30 for oral pr- entations and 21 for posters. In the main conference, we had four very interesting plenary talks: "Modelling Adaptive and Intelligent Behaviour: Some Historical and Epistemological Issues" by Roberto Cordeschi, "Insect-Machine Hybrid System for Understanding an Adaptive Behavior" by Ryohei Kanzaki, "Body Shapes Brain - Emergence and Development of Behavior and Mind from Embodied Interaction Dynamics" by Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and "Thinking and Learning Close to the Sensory- Motor Surface Creates Knowledge That Transcends the Here and Now" by Linda Smith. On the second day, we had a special joint session with the British Council featuring special talks by Giacomo Rizzolatti and Ron Chrisley followed, by a panel discussion. After the main conference, we had a workshop and two tutorials.

In Exploring Robotic Minds: Actions, Symbols, and Consciousness as Self-Organizing Dynamic Phenomena, Jun Tani sets out to answer an essential and tantalizing question: How do our minds work? By providing an overview of his "synthetic neurorobotics" project, Tani reveals how symbols and concepts that represent the world can emerge in a neurodynamic structure-iterative interactions between the top-down subjective view, which proactively acts on the world, and the bottom-up recognition of the resultant perceptual reality. He argues that nontrivial problems of consciousness and free will could be addressed through structural understanding of such iterative, conflicting interactions between the top-down and the bottom-up pathways. A wide range of readers will enjoy this wonderful journey of the mind and will follow the author on interdisciplinary discussions that span neuroscience, dynamical systems theories, robotics, and phenomenology. The book also includes many figures, as well as a link to videos of Tani's exciting robotic experiments.