The importance of viewing cognition as the result of emergent processes occurring at different time scales

In this paper we will show how robots that are able to exploit behavior that emerge from fine-grained interaction with the physical and social environment can solve complex problems in simple and effective ways. By exploiting the interaction with the environment robots are also able to produce dynamical behaviors involving phases that extend over time scales that are significant larger than the time scale at which interactions with the environment occur. Moreover, we will show how problems that require robots able to detect regularities occurring at different time scales might require control systems that are able to process sensory-motor information at different time scales and to detect amount of changes in amount of time