Mental imagery and planning are important aspects of cognitive behaviour. Being able to predict outcomes through mental simulation can increase environmental fitness and reduce uncertainty. Such predictions reduce surprise and fit with thermodynamically driven theories of brain function by attempting to reduce entropy. In the present work, the authors tested these ideas in a predator–prey scenario where agents with a limited energy budget had to maximise food intake, while avoiding a predator. Forward planning agents, with the ability to mentalise, to Actor Critic agents that do not plan beyond the current state were also compared. The authors show that the ability to mentalise has distinct advantages when in noisy, uncertain stimuli. These advantages are even more prevalent when tested in the real world on physical robots. The authors’ results highlight the importance of taking into consideration mental imagery and embodiment when constructing artificial cognitive systems.

Numerical cognition is a distinctive component of human intelligence such that the observation of its practice provides a window in high-level brain function. The modelling of numerical abilities in artificial cognitive systems can help to confirm existing child development hypotheses and define new ones by means of computational simulations. Meanwhile, new research will help to discover innovative principles for the design of artificial agents with advanced reasoning capabilities and clarify the underlying algorithms (e.g. deep learning) that can be highly effective but difficult to understand for humans. This study promotes new investigation by providing a common resource for researchers with different backgrounds, including computer science, robotics, neuroscience, psychology, and education, who are interested in pursuing scientific collaboration on mutually stimulating research on this topic. The study emphasises the fundamental role of embodiment in the initial development of numerical cognition in children. This strong relationship with the body motivates the cognitive developmental robotics (CDR) approach for new research that can (among others) help standardise data collection and provide open databases for benchmarking computational models. Furthermore, the authors discuss the potential application of robots in classrooms and argue that the CDR approach can be extended to assist educators and favour mathematical education.

Earth surface vibration signals source classification and propagation distance estimation attract increasing attention in recent years due to the wide applications in many areas. In this study, the authors develop a hybrid classification and propagation distance estimation algorithm for general earth surface vibration sources. The spectrogram (SPEC) feature characterising the energy distribution of vibrations is first developed for signal representation in this study. The kernel-based extreme learning machine (KELM) algorithm is then adopted for the vibration source classification and propagation distance estimation. Comparing with the conventional approaches, the proposed KELM + SPEC algorithm is not only effective in characterising the time- and frequency-domain features of vibrations, but also superior in accuracy and efficiency. To test the effectiveness of the proposed KELM + SPEC algorithm, experiments on real collected vibration signals are presented, where simulations on both periodic and aperiodic vibrations are carried out in the study. Comparisons to various existing vibration signal extraction and classification algorithms are provided to show the advantages of the proposed KELM + SPEC algorithm.