Dr. Vito Trianni (LARAL-ISTC-CNR, Italy), Dr. Elio Tuci (LARAL-ISTC-CNR, Italy) and Prof. Kevin M. Passino (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ohio State University, OH, USA) will be the editors of a special issue on Swarm Cognition for the Swarm Intelligence Journal. The call for papers can be found at the following address: http://laral.istc.cnr.it/swarm-cognition/Main_Page. Hereafter is the accompanying text that describes the expectation of this special issue. 

Swarm Cognition is the juxtaposition of two relatively unrelated concepts that evoke, on the one hand, the power of collective behaviours displayed by natural swarms, and on the other hand the complexity of cognitive processes in the vertebrate brain. In recent years, scientists from various disciplines have been suggesting that, at a certain level of description, operational principles used to account for the behaviour of natural swarms may turn out to be extremely powerful tools to identify the neuroscientic basis of cognition. Generally speaking, these studies claim that the massively parallel animal-to-animal interactions which operationally explain cognitive processes of natural swarms are functionally similar to neuron-to-neuron communication which underlie the cognitive abilities of living organisms, including humans. With this premise, research work in Swarm Cognition aims at identifying the operational principles of cognitive behaviour by calling upon the underlying mechanisms of self-organising systems, i.e., systems whose internal organisation changes without being guided by an outside source.

We encourage submissions of innovative research work which highlights the importance of the mechanisms of self-organisation as operational principles to explain cognitive processes displayed by individuals or collectives, both natural and artificial. Particularly welcome are contributions focusing on the distributed mechanisms underlying cognitive processes, like, for instance, decision-making, attention, learning or memory.
Topics of interest in relationship to the above issues include but are not limited to:

• Cognitive and computational neurosciences
• Cognitive and social ethology
• Swarm intelligence and swarm robotics
• Adaptive control
• Systems biology
• Neural computation and distributed representations
• Cultural evolution and Learning
• Cognitive sociology
• Bounded rationality

Important dates for this special issue are: 

• Manuscript due: March 15, 2010
• Notication: May 31, 2010
• Final manuscript due: July 19, 2010