Over the past few decades, it has become evident that traditional AI is limited as an engineering tool for building systems that can respond in real time to open-ended, ever-changing environments of the kind in which intelligence is really needed. Some suggest that the various disciplines under the heading of Artificial Life may be of great value in creating robots that can respond in "creative" ways. For example, recent work in situated robotics has revealed that meaningful (although primitive) behavior can emerge without the need for internal representations. In other words, it is possible to build a robot that follows walls without having to put any representation of a wall inside its controlling mechanism. There are no explicit programs inside the robot that instruct it to follow walls. Walls need not be formally defined in order to produce this behavior. Even though the robot won't follow the same wall in exactly the same way each time it nears the wall, it can be respond to the wall with behavior that singles out walls as a meaningful feature of its environment. This interactively emergent behavior of wall-following may lead to more complex behavior.

Catching Ourselves in the Act suggests scientific explanations of development and learning that link various disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, and situated robotics. It provides an overview of autonomous agent research and artificial life, and explores the impact of situated robotics in understanding human psychology.

The book is not light reading but should be of great interest to those interested in computational models of the mind.