Time perception in shaping cognitive neurodynamics of artificial agents

Recent research in cognitive systems aims to uncover important aspects of biological cognitive processes and additionally formulate design principles for implementing artificially intelligent systems. Despite the increasing amount of research efforts addressing cognitive phenomena, the issue of time perception and how it is linked to other cognitive processes remains largely unexplored. In the current paper, we make a first attempt for studying artificial time perception by means of simulated robotic experiments. Specifically, we investigate a behavioral rule switching task consisting of repeating trials with dynamic temporal duration. An evolutionary process is used to search for neuronal mechanisms accomplishing the rule switching task taking also into account its particular temporal characteristics. Our repeated simulation experiments showed that (i) time perception and ordinary cognitive processes may co-exist in the system sharing the same neural resources, and (ii) time perception dynamics bias the functionality of neural mechanisms with other cognitive responsibilities. Finally, in the current paper we make contact of the obtained results with previous brain imaging studies on time perception, and we make predictions for possible time-related dynamics in the real brain.