1 Studying the Emergence of Grounded Representations: Exploring the Power and the Limits of Sensory-Motor Coordination Stefano Nolfi* Orazio Miglino** *Institute of Psychology, National Research Council Viale Marx, 15, 00137, Rome, Italy e-mail: stefano@kant.irmkant.rm.cnr.it **Department of Psychology, University of Palermo Viale delle Scienze, Parco d'Orleans, Palermo, Italy e-mail: orazio@caio.irmkant.rm.cnr.it 1. Introduction The word ‘consciousness’ is often used by referring to different meanings. Moreover different level of consciousness may be identified (see Chalmers, 1995). In this paper we will deal with the very first levels of consciousness from an evolutionary point of view. In particular we will try to investigate in which conditions we can expect the emergence of internal representations in populations of evolving agents interacting with an external environment. Also the word ‘representation’ can be used with different meaning. In this paper we will indicate agents which do not have any internal representation as pure sensory-motor agents. An example of such system is a robot controlled by a perceptron with a set of sensory neurons connected with a set of motor neurons through a set of weights. The sensory neurons are activated by the external environment and the motor neurons determine the action of the agent in the environment. The weights determine the activation of the output neurons and as a consequence the way in which the agent react to each possible sensory state. Pure sensory-motor agents may adapt to the environment by changing phylogenetically, generations after generation. However they not change during their lifetime. As a consequence they react always in the same way to the same sensory states during lifetime.