IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development

Cognitive developmental robotics (CDR) aims to provide new understanding of how human's higher cognitive functions develop by means of a synthetic approach that developmentally constructs cognitive functions. The core idea of CDR is ldquophysical embodimentrdquo that enables information structuring through interactions with the environment, including other agents. The idea is shaped based on the h... View full abstract»

During the learning of speech sounds and other perceptual categories, category labels are not provided, the number of categories is unknown, and the stimuli are encountered sequentially. These constraints provide a challenge for models, but they have been recently addressed in the online mixture estimation model of unsupervised vowel category learning (see Vallabha in the reference section). The m... View full abstract»

A difficulty in robot action learning is that robots do not know where to attend when observing action demonstration. Inspired by human parent-infant interaction, we suggest that parental action demonstration to infants, called motionese, can scaffold robot learning as well as infants'. Since infants' knowledge about the context is limited, which is comparable to robots, parents are suppose... View full abstract»

Infants learning about their environment are confronted with many stimuli of different modalities. Therefore, a crucial problem is how to discover which stimuli are related, for instance, in learning words. In making these multimodal ldquobindings,rdquo infants depend on social interaction with a caregiver to guide their attention towards relevant stimuli. The caregiver might, for example, visuall... View full abstract»

Development imposes great challenges. Internal ldquocorticalrdquorepresentations must be autonomously generated from interactive experiences. The eventual quality of these developed representations is of course important. Additionally, learning must be as fast as possible-to quickly derive better representation from limited experiences. Those who achieve both of these will have competitive advanta... View full abstract»

Agency is the sense that I am the cause or author of a movement. Babies develop early this feeling by perceiving the contingency between afferent (sensor) and efferent (motor) information. A comparator model is hypothesized to be associated with many brain regions to monitor and simulate the concordance between self-produced actions and their consequences. In this paper, we propose that the biolog... View full abstract»