This book provides an integrated framework for natural and artificial cognition by highlighting the fundamental role played by the cognitive architecture in the dialectics with the surrounding environment and consequently in the definition of a particular meaningful world. This book is also about embodied and non-embodied artificial systems, cognitive architectures that are human constructs, meant to be able to populate the human world, capable of identifying different life contexts and replicating human patterns of behavior capable of acting according to human values and conventions, systems that perform tasks in a human-like way. By identifying the essential phenomena at the core of all forms of cognition, the book addresses the topic of design of artificial cognitive architectures in the domains of robotics and artificial life. Moving from mere bio-inspired design methodology it aims to open a pathway to semiotically determined design.

Taking as biological inspiration the Antonio Damasioproposal that the brain emotion mechanisms are essential forappropriate decision-making, a conceptual model for an autonomousagent based on a double-representation paradigm ispresented. Stimuli is represented under two distinct perspectives, thusinducing two representation schemata with different properties.The consequences of this model are explored in various forms. First, the applicability of the model to anticipation, and to the formulation ofcausal models about the world are explored. And second, a formalapproach is presented, where theoretical consequences arederived, first from a probabilistic standpoint, followed by an approachbased on the assumption that the above-mentioned representationslive in metric spaces. Following this latter approach, an algorithmis proposed to adapt the metric for one of the spaces, as well as toprovide a guidance for the improvement of that representation, aiming at the creation of new features. The formulation of thisalgorithm is based on Multidimensional Scaling technique