Where Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience Meet: The Search for Grounded Architectures of Cognition

Abstract

The collaboration between artificial intelligence and neuroscience can produce an understanding of the mechanisms in the brain that generate human cognition. This article reviews multidisciplinary research lines that could achieve this understanding. Artificial intelligence has an important role to play in research, because artificial intelligence focuses on the mechanisms that generate intelligence and cognition. Artificial intelligence can also benefit from studying the neural mechanisms of cognition, because this research can reveal important information about the nature of intelligence and cognition itself. I will illustrate this aspect by discussing the grounded nature of human cognition. Human cognition is perhaps unique because it combines grounded representations with computational productivity. I will illustrate that this combination requires specific neural architectures. Investigating and simulating these architectures can reveal how they are instantiated in the brain. The way these architectures implement cognitive processes could also provide answers to fundamental problems facing the study of cognition.