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Workshop on Cognitive Neurorobotics

Date

Thursday, March 5, 2026 - 13:30 to 18:00

Location

L5D23, Lab5

Description

 

Workshop on Cognitive Neurorobotics

Organized by Jun Tani, Tani Unit, OIST

March 5, 13:30—18:00, Seminar room L5D23, Lab 5

 

Description

Recent advances in artificial intelligence—particularly large language models—have demonstrated impressive performance across a wide range of cognitive tasks. However, from neurological, psychological, and developmental perspectives, the nature of this intelligence remains fundamentally different from human cognition. While artificial systems may surpass human abilities in specific domains, the mechanisms through which they acquire such capabilities diverge markedly from the developmental processes through which humans learn from infancy. Human cognition emerges through prolonged interaction with the physical and social environment, shaped by sensorimotor development, caregiver interaction, affective regulation, and the gradual construction of internal models over time.

 
Developmental psychology highlights how core cognitive functions—such as perception, action, language, and social understanding—co-develop through embodied exploration and experience-dependent learning. Humans demonstrate a remarkable ability to generalize from limited data, an ability closely tied to developmental constraints, curiosity-driven behavior, and adaptive inference in uncertain environments. These insights raise critical questions for cognitive neurorobotics: Can cognitive processes that are not grounded in bodily action and sensory experience—such as those underlying current large language models—be meaningfully compared to human cognition? How might frameworks such as active inference, which emphasize developmental learning through perception–action loops and the minimization of uncertainty, provide a principled account of cognitive development in both biological and artificial systems?
 
Furthermore, the workshop addresses whether higher-level phenomena such as agency, consciousness, and free will might emerge through developmental processes in artificial systems, and under what embodied and social conditions such emergence could occur. This workshop aims to bring together leading researchers in cognitive neurorobotics and related fields, drawing on neuroscience, developmental psychology, philosophy of life, and phenomenology. Through interdisciplinary dialogue, the goal is to clarify foundational issues of cognitive development and identify new pathways toward more human-like, embodied, and developmentally grounded artificial intelligence.
 

Tentative program

13:30-13:40: Introduction, Jun Tani, OIST

13:40-14:40: Collective Intelligence in LLM agents, Takashi Ikegami, Univ. of Tokyo

14:40-15:40: Deep Active Inference for Real-World Robotic Systems, Shingo Murata, Keio Univ.

15:40-16:00: Coffee break

16:00-17:00: A Consideration of Robot Foundation Models as Embodied Intelligence, Tetsuya Ogata, Waseda Univ.

17:00-18:00: Propagation of Mind Through the Mechanism of Superposition, Hiro Iizuka, Hokkaido Univ.

All-OIST Category: 
Workshop

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