[…] Cognition depends on the kind of experiences that come from having a body
Thelen, E., Schoner, G., Scheier, C., and Smith, L.B.(2001), The Dynamics of Embodiment
Nowadays, neuroscience, anthropology and philosophy converge in considering the activity of hand and touch as essential in the development of superior cognitive faculties like memory, imagination, language. the hand, more than the brain, has shaped language and culture.
That the hand may determine and anticipate cognition is not “the innocuous and obvious claim that we need a body to reason; rather, it is the striking claim that the very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment. The same neural and cognitive mechanisms that allow us to perceive and move around also create our conceptual systems and modes of reason“ (Philosophy in the flesh: the embodied mind and its challenge to western thought, G. Lackoff, M. Johnson, Basic Books, 1999).Thus, to completely understand intelligence, we must first understand the details of our hand’s sensorimotor system. In Robotics, it is quite tempting to think of a similar hypothesis, namely that the design of mechanical hands, including the principles of low‐level sensing and control, will shape, at least in part, the development of the field of artificial intelligence at large.
This project is founded on the notion of the hand as a cognitive organ – how its physical embodiment enables and determines its behaviors, skills, and cognitive functions. Its title, THE Hand Embodied, refers to the “hand” as both the abstract cognitive entity – standing for the sense of active touch – and the physical embodiment of such sense, comprised of actuators and sensors that ultimately realize the link between perception and action. Central to this project is the concept of constraints imposed by the embodied characteristics of the hand and its sensorimotor apparatus on the learning and control strategies we use for such fundamental cognitive functions as exploring, grasping and manipulating.
From our viewpoint, such constraints are not merely bounds that limit performance, but rather are the dominating factors which affected and effectively determined how cognition has developed in the unique, admirable form we are able to observe on Earth – hence, they really are to be considered “enabling constraints” which organize the hand embodied. The project hinges about two systems of such enabling constraints, or synergies, respectively in the hand motor system and in the tactile and kinaesthetic sensory system, and about their interaction. Motor and sensory synergies are also our two key ideas for advancing the state of the art in artificial system architectures for the “hand” as a cognitive organ: indeed, the ultimate goal of THE Hand Embodied project is to learn from human data and hypotheses‐driven simulations how to better control, and even design, robot hands and haptic interfaces.
In this project, we will review, interpret, and apply the existing evidence of synergistic organization of the hand, and extend these studies in new directions, with a particular emphasis on how these constraints extend through the neuromuscular system from thebehavioral aspects of finger movements and forces to the control of the hand from the motor cortex.
