This volume documents the proceedings of the Annual International Conference on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures BICA 2011, which is the Second Annual Meeting of the BICA Society, and the fourth annual BICA meeting. Like in the previous years, the main body of the present volume contains a wide variety of ideas and approaches documented in research papers, position papers and abstracts presented at the conference that are all sorted alphabetically by the last name of the first author, with the exception of the first introductory chapter (intended as a guide to the Reader). The main body is followed by two supplementary parts. All papers and abstracts included in this volume were carefully peer-refereed by the Program Committee members and external reviewers (the acceptance rate was 83%).

Throughout this book, the acronym “BICA” stands for Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures: computational models that incorporate formal mechanisms of human and animal cognition, drawn from cognitive science and neuroscience into artificial intelligence (for a definition, please see the first and the last chapters). The series of BICA conferences was initiated in 2008 under the umbrella of AAAI Fall Symposia Series, as a follow-up on the abruptly terminated DARPA BICA program. Over the last 4 years, BICA conference developed into a mid-size international conference organized and sponsored by the BICA Society. The conference focuses on emergent hot topics in computer and brain sciences unified by the challenge of replicating the human mind in a computer.

Given the size of the volume, even a brief overview of its content cannot be given in a short preface. Therefore, for an introduction, we refer the reader to the first chapter (by K.R. Jóhannsdóttir and A.V. Samsonovich) that provides a brief overview of this volume, placing it in the broader context of recent emergent developments in the field of BICA. This introductory chapter also serves as a read-me-first document and a guide to the book. Papers reflected in it are grouped by topics and are connected to each other. Anybody who wants to start learning about the field of BICA by reading this book is encouraged to start with the introductory chapter.

We would like to thank all members of the Organizing and Program Committees for their help with the organization of this conference, selection and review of the materials. In particular, we are very grateful to Drs. Antonio Chella, Brandon Rohrer, and Christian Lebiere for their active service on the Core Organizing Committee. We also wish to thank all those who helped us with local organization and arrangements, including Mr. Michael Galvin, Ms. Grace Radfar, Ms. Nicole Charles, and many others. The last, but not the least, is our great thanks to Chris Poulin for his generous financial support of the discussion panel on the Roadmap to Human-Level AI, made possible via a donation to the BICA Society from Patterns and Predictions.

Alexei V. Samsonovich and Kamilla R. Jóhannsdóttir, Editors