Cognitive Development and Symbol Emergence

Call for Papers

Cognitive Development and Symbol Emergence

Journal: Advanced Robotics
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Manuscript Submission Deadline: 31 August 2026

Advanced Robotics invites submissions for its Special Section titled "Cognitive Development and Symbol Emergence."

About the Special Section

Developing robots capable of lifelong learning, adaptive reasoning, and meaningful communication requires a deeper understanding of cognitive development and symbol emergence. While cognitive development focuses on how robots acquire knowledge and adapt through interaction, symbol emergence explores how grounded symbols, language, and communication systems evolve through engagement with the physical and social environment.

This Special Section aims to bring together interdisciplinary research that advances cognitive robotics, embodied AI, developmental learning, and symbolic representation. It welcomes contributions that integrate insights from robotics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, neuroscience, developmental psychology, linguistics, and related fields to create intelligent, adaptive, and human-like robotic systems.

Scope and Topics of Interest

Submissions may address, but are not limited to:

• Cognitive development and developmental robotics

• Cognitive robotics and embodied AI

• Symbol emergence and symbol grounding

• Symbolic representation and communication

• Language acquisition in robots

• Embodied cognition and multimodal learning

• Human-like cognitive systems

• Human–robot interaction and social interaction

• Lifelong and open-ended learning

• Intrinsic motivation and exploration

• Machine learning and deep learning for robotics

• Representation learning and predictive coding

• Active inference and free-energy principle

• World models and probabilistic generative models

• Brain-inspired cognitive systems

Submission Guidelines

• Manuscript Submission Deadline: 31 August 2026

• The Special Section accepts:

  • Full Papers (approximately 6,000 words)

  • Short Papers (approximately 3,500 words)

  • Survey Papers (up to 12,000 words)

• Authors should select the appropriate article type and choose "[SS] Cognitive Development and Symbol Emergence" during submission.

• Accepted papers will be published in Advanced Robotics and compiled as an online Article Collection on the Taylor & Francis platform.

Special Issue Editors

• Tadahiro Taniguchi — Kyoto University

• Yukie Nagai — The University of Tokyo

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