My talk started by assuming the real challenge of systematicity for dynamical approaches. The work of René Thom and Jean Petitot on morphodynamics and cognitive grammars serves as a powerful framework to solve this problem. In the second part of the talk I defend a contemporary re-appraisal of the notion of habit within the Piagetian framework, with illustrations from evolutionary robotics. You can download the pdf of the slides bellow:

New paper in collaboration with my PhD student Bruno Santos, the paper is based on a simulation of Evolutionary Robotics where the controller is a Kuromoto network of oscillators, metastable dynamic regimes of phase relation (phase locking and phase scattering) are analyzed in continuous recurrent interaction between the agent and its environment.

New paper in collaboration with Miguel Aguilera and Manuel Bedia (almost all credit should go to them), we shaped a problem of temporality of action that we named the adjustment-deployment dilemma which has received no formal treatment till now: how much time should I invest adjusting or improving an action and how much deploying or executing it?

Egbert, M. D., Barandiaran, X. E., & Di Paolo, E. A. (2010). A Minimal Model of Metabolism-Based Chemotaxis. PLoS Comput Biol, 6(12), e1001004.

We present the first model of metabolism-based chemotaxis that accomplishes chemotaxis without transmembrane receptors or signal transduction proteins, through the direct modulation of flagellar rotation by metabolite concentrations. The minimal model recreates chemotactic patterns found in real bacteria, illuminating some previous work metabolism-dependent chemotaxis. A nice example of the inpiration taken from an autonomous perspective on agency, linking metabolism and behaviour.

ABSTRACT: Since the pioneering work by Julius Adler in the 1960′s, bacterial chemotaxis has been predominantly studied as metabolism-independent. All available simulation models of bacterial chemotaxis endorse this assumption. Recent studies have shown, however, that many metabolism-dependent chemotactic patterns occur in bacteria. We hereby present the simplest artificial protocell model capable of performing metabolism-based chemotaxis. The model serves as a proof of concept to show how even the simplest metabolism can sustain chemotactic patterns of varying sophistication. It also reproduces a set of phenomena that have recently attracted attention on bacterial chemotaxis and provides insights about alternative mechanisms that could instantiate them. We conclude that relaxing the metabolism-independent assumption provides important theoretical advances, forces us to rethink some established pre-conceptions and may help us better understand unexplored and poorly understood aspects of bacterial chemotaxis.

What is surprising is not the long history of the term (Aristotle’s ethics are well known to be based on habits or the British associationist school is well known for taking habits as one of their favorite notions). What is surprising is the intricate historical phylogeny of the concepts, its many ramifications and creeper like twists in history.

Please email me if you want the .SVG file (for Inkscape) to edit and modify the work, and yes, as always, if possible, it is under a CreativeCommons-By-Sa license.

We provide two proofs of concept of how metabolism can guide behavior, and behavior can guide metabolism to bootstrap a process of push-me-pull-you positive feedback between the evolution of metabolism and that of behavior. Implications for early protocellular evolutionary scenarios are discussed.