Natural Computational Architectures for Cognitive Info-Communication

TL;DR

This paper reviews biologically inspired computational models and natural architectures that span from cellular to human cognition, emphasizing interdisciplinary approaches and recent advances in understanding natural cognition.

Contribution

It presents a framework connecting natural computation with cognitive architectures across different biological levels, highlighting recent developments and future research directions.

Findings

Natural computation underpins the evolution of complex cognitive systems.

Basal cell cognition has potential applications in medicine and nanorobotics.

Interdisciplinary approaches are crucial for advancing biologically realistic cognitive models.

Abstract

Recent comprehensive overview of 40 years of research in cognitive architectures, (Kotseruba and Tsotsos 2020), evaluates modelling of the core cognitive abilities in humans, but only marginally addresses biologically plausible approaches based on natural computation. This mini review presents a set of perspectives and approaches which have shaped the development of biologically inspired computational models in the recent past that can lead to the development of biologically more realistic cognitive architectures. For describing continuum of natural cognitive architectures, from basal cellular to human-level cognition, we use evolutionary info-computational framework, where natural/ physical/ morphological computation leads to evolution of increasingly complex cognitive systems. Forty years ago, when the first cognitive architectures have been proposed, understanding of cognition, embodiment and evolution was different. So was the state of the art of information physics, bioinformatics, information chemistry, computational neuroscience, complexity theory, self-organization, theory of evolution, information and computation. Novel developments support a constructive interdisciplinary framework for cognitive architectures in the context of computing nature, where interactions between constituents at different levels of organization lead to complexification of agency and increased cognitive capacities. We identify several important research questions for further investigation that can increase understanding of cognition in nature and inspire new developments of cognitive technologies. Recently, basal cell cognition attracted a lot of interest for its possible applications in medicine, new computing technologies, as well as micro- and nanorobotics.