Behaviorism Revisited: Linking Perception and Action Through Symbolic Models of Cognition

Brain simulations as performed today in computational neuroscience rely on analytical methods i.e., mainly differential equations, to model physical processes. The question then arises: will cognitive abilities of real brains spontaneously emerge from these simulations, or should they be encoded and executed on top of them, similarly to the way computer software runs on hardware? Towards this later goal, a new framework linking neural dynamics to behaviors through a virtual machine has been reported and is used here to model brain functionalities in two domains, namely evolutive cases of analogical reasoning and a simple case of meta-cognition. It is argued that this approach to brain modeling could lead to an actualization of the concept of behaviorism as a model for the development of cognition