On the interplay between “learning, memory, prospection and abstraction” in cumulatively learning baby humanoids

We all `inhabit' continuously changing unstructured worlds where neither everything can be known nor can everything be experienced. The lifelong interplay between neural mechanisms associated with learning, memory, prospection and abstraction play a fundamental role in enabling cognitive agents to effortlessly connect their `past' with the `available present' and `possible future', most often in the context of realization of one's internal goals (and taking into account neurobiological and physical constraints related to one's embodiment). Investigation into the computational and neural basis underlying such mechanisms have value both from an intrinsic viewpoint of better understanding our own selves and at the same time creating artifacts that can flexibly assist us in the environments we inhabit and create (domestic, industrial, several others). Simply put, beyond a certain point a software programmer cannot travel the journey of a cognitive robot, they must learn to do it themselves! Enabling them to do so offers us with a unique opportunity to reenact the gradual process of infant developmental learning and investigate deeper into the underlying interplay between multiple fundamental cognitive processes from the perspective of an “integrated system” (human or humanoid that perceives, acts, learns, forgets and reasons). The article reports some advanced experiments conducted on the baby humanoid iCub to this effect, mainly 1. Learning to push and begin to anticipate how objects move, use this knowledge and 2. Learning to build the tallest possible stack given a random set of objects to play with (learning going on cumulatively in an open ended fashion). These playful experiments are used to summarize the gradually evolving cognitive architecture of the young EU funded project DARWIN.