Strong Spatial Cognition

The ability to perform spatial tasks is crucial for everyday life and of great importance to cognitive agents such as humans, animals, and autonomous robots. Natural embodied and situated agents often solve spatial tasks without detailed knowledge about geometric, topological, or mechanical laws; they directly relate actions to effects enabled by spatio-temporal affordances in their bodies and their environments. Accordingly, we propose a cognitive processing paradigm that makes the spatio-temporal substrate an integral part of the problem-solving engine. We show how spatial and temporal structures in body and environment can support and replace reasoning effort in computational processes: physical manipulation and perception in spatial environments substitute formal computation, in this approach. The strong spatial cognition paradigm employs affordance-based object-level problem solving to complement knowledge-level computation. The paper presents proofs of concept by providing physical spatial solutions to familiar spatial problems for which no equivalent computational solutions are known.