Related papers: A computational model of infant sensorimotor explo…
The mechanisms of infant development are far from understood. Learning about one's own body is likely a foundation for subsequent development. Here we look specifically at the problem of how spontaneous touches to the body in early infancy…
Infants are experts at playing, with an amazing ability to generate novel structured behaviors in unstructured environments that lack clear extrinsic reward signals. We seek to replicate some of these abilities with a neural network that…
Infants' neurological development is heavily influenced by their motor skills. Evaluating a baby's movements is key to understanding possible risks of developmental disorders in their growth. Previous research in psychology has shown that…
The young infant explores its body, its sensorimotor system, and the immediately accessible parts of its environment, over the course of a few months creating a model of peripersonal space useful for reaching and grasping objects around it.…
Promoting exploratory movements through contingent feedback can positively influence motor development in infancy. Our ongoing work gears toward the development of a robot-assisted contingency learning environment through the use of small…
Infants' spontaneous and voluntary movements mirror developmental integrity of brain networks since they require coordinated activation of multiple sites in the central nervous system. Accordingly, early detection of infants with atypical…
Humans and animals excel in combining information from multiple sensory modalities, controlling their complex bodies, adapting to growth, failures, or using tools. These capabilities are also highly desirable in robots. They are displayed…
Infants explore their complex physical and social environment in an organized way. To gain insight into what intrinsic motivations may help structure this exploration, we create a virtual infant agent and place it in a…
In this paper we present a neurally plausible model of robot reaching inspired by human infant reaching that is based on embodied artificial intelligence, which emphasizes the importance of the sensory-motor interaction of an agent and the…
Infants often exhibit goal-directed behaviors, such as reaching for a sensory stimulus, even when no external reward criterion is provided. These intrinsically motivated behaviors facilitate spontaneous exploration and learning of the body…
Motion retargeting from humans to human-like artificial agents is becoming increasingly important as humanoid robots grow more capable. However, most existing approaches focus only on reproducing kinematics and ignore the rich sensorimotor…
Movement experience and the coordination of perception and action are the basis of developing body awareness, emotion, motivation and cognition and the sense of self. The four limbs play a key role in the developing sense of body ownership,…
Human intelligence and human consciousness emerge gradually during the process of cognitive development. Understanding this development is an essential aspect of understanding the human mind and may facilitate the construction of artificial…
Infants develop complex visual understanding rapidly, even preceding the acquisition of linguistic skills. As computer vision seeks to replicate the human vision system, understanding infant visual development may offer valuable insights.…
This paper uses a simple state machine to develop a control algorithm for controlling an infant humanoid in the context of a simple model system. The algorithm is inspired by a baby who starts learning to stand and walk at 7 to 12 months of…
Understanding infant development is one of the greatest scientific challenges of contemporary science. A large source of difficulty comes from the fact that the development of skills in infants results from the interactions of multiple…
Human infants have the remarkable ability to learn the associations between object names and visual objects from inherently ambiguous experiences. Researchers in cognitive science and developmental psychology have built formal models that…
Early in development, infants learn to extract surprisingly complex aspects of visual scenes. This early learning comes together with an initial understanding of the extracted concepts, such as their implications, causality, and using them…
Infants expect physical objects to be rigid and persist through space and time and in spite of occlusion. Developmentists frequently attribute these expectations to a "core system" for object recognition. However, it is unclear if this move…
Biological infants are naturally curious and try to comprehend their physical surroundings by interacting, in myriad multisensory ways, with different objects - primarily macroscopic solid objects - around them. Through their various…