Artificial Life as a Virtual Lab for Cognitive Science Experiments

Artificial Life This tutorial presents some concepts and principles of Artificial Life, and then focuses on how to develop applications that can assist researchers, considering mainly their work on cognitive sciences. These include virtual experiments of social behavior, live beings evolution, adaptive live systems, learning, decision taking, and communication abilities. Artificial Life (Adami, 1998) is a research area related to cognitive sciences (Thagart, 1998) on many aspects. Both study live beings, propose models to simulate some of their characteristics and to evaluate their behavior. Even though different in other aspects, their strong relationship allows a linkage between both, as for instance in the conduction of virtual experiments. Some artificial life models an