Welcome to Jun TANI's Homepage

Compositionality has been considered as an essential feature of human
cognition. It looks as if meanings of sentences were derived from
compositions of words and complex human acts were generated from
compositions of reusable behavior primitives. However, if we look at our
everyday behaviors, most of them seem to be generated in more "organic"
ways rather than in computational ways of, as like, manipulating concrete
objects. Our behaviors are quite context-dependent, surprisingly flexible
and emergent while being robust and fluent.

Now, our synthetic robotics studies for two decades are ready to show that
the self-organization processes of neuro-dynamic systems structured through
ample of their sensory-motor level interactions have resulted in so-called
the "organic" compositionality that affords the above mentioned properties
of human cognitive behaviors. Ultimately, our approaches are extended to
elucidate immanent properties of "symbols", "self" and "time" in our
subjective mind through the triangular researches on neuroscience,
dynamical systems and phenomenology.