Priority Programme “The Active Self”
Deadline: 27. Januar 2021
The Priority Programme brings together cognitive and behavioural scientists from various disciplines, including psychology and robotics, to study the sensorimotor grounding of the human minimal self. This concept describes a person’s phenomenal experience in the here and now and how we perceive ourselves to be in a particular situation. he programme seeks to unravel the degree to which our self-representation is plastic and sensitive to immediate experience, to which degree it is constrained by past experience, how it integrates experiences of agency and action-ownership, how it affects other cognitive processes, and to what degree self-representation can be established in artificial agents. The programme is intended to be strongly interdisciplinary in nature and proposals for the second funding phase are required to include cooperation across disciplinary borders.
The prgramm is adressing five key questions:
• To which extent is the self plastic?
• To which degree does the sensorimotor impact on the self rely on or interact with internal, endogenous constraints?
• What are the roles of body ownership and agency
• How does creating and having a self work back on sensorimotor skills and cognitive processes?
• What are the mechanisms and prerequisites that allow an agent to develop a self?