The research group moved to Paderborn University where Prof. Dr. Katharina Rohlfing is Professor for Psycholinguistics.

About Us

The interdisciplinary research group Emergentist Semantics investigated constraints of different natures that contribute to the emergence of meaning in children and learning systems. In this approach, cognition is seen as extending not only multimodally but also beyond an individual brain. Accordingly, an embodied agent does not have to create the meaning solely relying on his own cognitive capabilities; instead, an agent's attentional processes are already guided and educated by the physical and social environment to specific aspects.

The general goal of the research group was to identify different sources of information reduction and analyze their effects. This is in line with the goals of the memory and learning research area within the CITEC aiming at the explanation of how humans manage to actively filter the information from the environment and to attend to certain sources of information while ignoring others. Our main contribution to the research in CITEC was to help research in robotics to develop ways of reducing the complexity of the acquisition problem, i.e. to reduce the requirements on built-in architectural constraints of learning mechanisms.