This year ABiALS invites submission of abstracts to be discussed (or shown as posters) during the workshop. Abstract submissions should be sent electronically via email in pdf or ps format to: giovanni.pezzulo@istc.cnr.it, indicating in the subject line "ABiALS2008 submission". Submitted abstracts should have a maximal length of four pages in 10pt, one-column format. Please use the LNCS Springer-Verlag style at http://www.springeronline.com/comp/lncs/authors.html. Abstracts will be reviewed for acceptance by the program committee and the organizers.

ABiALS is an interdisciplinary workshop investigating the influence of anticipations on behavior and learning. ABiALS is designed to help investigate how anticipations can influence, initiate, and guide behavior and learning as well as how anticipatory influences can be implemented in an adaptive learning system.

Anticipatory behavior is a mechanism, or a behavior, that does not only depend on the past and present but also on predictions, expectations, or beliefs about the future.

In ABiALS 2008, expertise of researchers from various disciplines including neuroscience, cognitive psychology, machine learning, artificial intelligence, control, and vision research are combined to shed further light on the concept of anticipation. Essentially, it is investigated how knowledge about the future influences actual behavior, including influences on attention, action decision making and control, as well as (behavioral and model) learning.

Key interests include:

• Anticipatory mechanisms and representations for model learning
• Model-predictive, adaptive control architectures
• Anticipatory, adaptive systems / agents
• Distinctions of anticipatory mechanisms
• Anticipatory mechanisms in animals and humans

• Behavioral psychological and neuroscientific insights on anticipatory behavior and future-oriented capabilities.
• Anticipatory functionalities and neural substrates for anticipatory mechanisms in the brain.
• Anticipations in decision making and goal-directed behavior.
• Trade-off between simple stimulus-response vs. more complex anticipatory driven behavior.
• Exploiting anticipations to direct or speed-up motor learning.
• Anticipatory mechanisms in motor learning and motor control.
• Anticipatory speed-up of sensory processing.
• Curiosity and novelty detection during learning and behavior.
• Epistemic actions for directed information search and directing attention.
• Modular integration of anticipatory mechanisms in cognitive system architectures.
• Suitability of predictive representations for anticipatory mechanisms.
• Hierarchical predictive and anticipatory architectures.
• Anticipations in interaction with motivations and emotions.
• Social anticipatory capabilities.
• Evolutionary development from reactive to anticipatory capabilities.

Deadline for abstract submission: 14 April 2008

Notification of acceptance: 14 May 2008

Final version of abstract due: 1 June 2008

ABiALS 2008 Workshop: 26 June 2008

Full paper submission for post-proceedings publication in the Springer LNAI series: mid/end September

Christian Balkenius, Andy Barto, Edoardo Datteri, Jason Fleischer, Oliver Herbort, Frederic Kaplan, Pier Luca Lanzi, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Tony Prescott, Alexander Riegler, Wolfram Schenck, Samarth Swarup, Marc Toussaint, Tom Ziemke

Giovanni Pezzulo Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (ISTC)-CNR, Via S. Martino della Battaglia 44, I-00185 Rome, Italy.
Email: giovanni.pezzulo[A@T]istc.cnr.it

Martin V. Butz Dep. of Psychology, University of Würzburg, Röntgenring 11, 97070 Würzburg, Germany
Email: butz[A@T]psychologie.uni-wuerzburg.de

Olivier Sigaud Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique (ISIR) - Université Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC) - Paris6, CNRS FRE 2507 - 4 place Jussieu, F75252 Paris Cedex 05
Email: olivier.sigaud[A@T]lip6.fr

Gianluca Baldassarre Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (ISTC)-CNR, Via S. Martino della Battaglia 44, I-00185 Rome, Italy.
Email: gianluca.baldassarre[A@T]istc.cnr.it