Evolutionary autonomous agents and the nature of apraxia.docVIP

BioMedical Engineering OnLine BioMedCentral Research Open Access Evolutionary autonomous agents and the nature of apraxia Donald S Borrett*1, Frank Jin2 and Hon C Kwan2 Address: 1Division of Neurology, Toronto East General Hospital, Toronto, Canada and 2Department of Physiology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada Email: Donald S Borrett* - d.borrett@utoronto.ca; Frank Jin - fjin@; Hon C Kwan - h.kwan@utoronto.ca * Corresponding author Published: 04 January 2005 Received: 07 October 2004 Accepted: 04 January 2005 BioMedical Engineering OnLine 2005, 4:1 doi:10.1186/1475-925X-4-1 This article is available from: /content/4/1/1 ? 2005 Borrett et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. evolutionary autonomous agentsapraxiaembodimentgenetic algorithmdynamical system theory Abstract Background: Evolutionary autonomous agents are robots or robot simulations whose controller is a dynamical neural network and whose evolution occurs autonomously under the guidance of a fitness function without the detailed or explicit direction of an external programmer. They are embodied agents with a simple neural network controller and as such they provide the optimal forum by which sensorimotor interactions in a specified environment can be studied without the computational assumptions inherent in standard neuroscience. Methods: Evolutionary autonomous agents were evolved that were able to perform identical movements under two different contexts, one which represented an automatic movement and one which had a symbolic context. In an attempt to model the automatic-voluntary dissociation frequently seen in ideomotor apraxia, lesions were introduced into the neural network controllers result