John Stening

Papers

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About

John Stening’s research lies at the fascinating intersection of robotics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence, where he explores how internal simulations of perception and action can give rise to higher cognition. His most influential work, “Imagination and Abstraction of Sensorimotor Flow: Towards a Robot Model” (2005, 20 citations), proposes a groundbreaking framework for understanding how robots might use abstract internal models to simulate sensory and motor experiences—essentially, how machines could “imagine.” This work builds on his earlier doctoral thesis (2004), which systematically investigated the neural and psychological underpinnings of internal simulation, drawing on recent findings in neuroscience to argue that perception and action can be replayed at an abstract level. While his citation counts are modest, Stening’s contributions are conceptually rich, offering a bridge between embodied robotics and theories of consciousness. His work is particularly notable for its interdisciplinary ambition, merging computational modeling with insights from psychology to ask fundamental questions about the nature of thought and representation in both biological and artificial systems.