Time in Consciousness, Memory and Human-Robot Interaction.

Contemporary research endeavors aim at equipping autonomous robots with human-like cognitive skills, in an attempt to promote robotic intelligence and make artificial agents more natural and more human-friendly. However, despite the crucial role that sense of time has in our daily activities, the capacity of artificial agents to experience the flow of time remains largely unexplored. The inability of existing systems to perceive time acts as an obstacle in implementing conscious artificial agents that put their experiences on the past-present-future timeline and develop durable symbiotic relationships with humans. The present paper elaborates on time-cognition coupling suggesting that the equipment of artificial agents with human-like time perception and time processing capacities is a prerequisite for bringing robotic cognition close to human intelligence.