Anticipatory adjustments to being picked up in infancy

Anticipation of the actions of others is often used as a measure of action understanding in infancy. In contrast to studies of action understanding which set infants up as observers of actions directed elsewhere, in the present study we explored anticipatory postural adjustments made by infants to one of the most common adult actions directed to them - picking them up. We observed infant behavioural changes and recorded their postural shifts on a pressure mat in three phases: (i) a prior Chat phase, (ii) from the onset of Approach of the mother's arms, and (iii) from the onset of Contact. In Study 1, eighteen 3-month-old infants showed systematic global postural changes during Approach and Contact, but not during Chat. There was an increase in specific adjustments of the arms (widening or raising) and legs (stiffening and extending or tucking up) during Approach and a decrease in thrashing/general movements during Contact. Shifts in postural stability were evident immediately after onset of Approach and more slowly after Contact, with no regular shifts during Chat. In Study 2 we followed ten infants at 2, 3 and 4 months of age. Anticipatory behavioural adjustments during Approach were present at all ages, but with greater differentiation from a prior Chat phase only at 3 and 4 months. Global postural shifts were also more phase differentiated in older infants. Moreover, there was significantly greater gaze to the mother's hands during Approach at 4 months. Early anticipatory adjustments to being picked up suggest that infants' awareness of actions directed to the self may occur earlier than of those directed elsewhere, and thus enable infants' active participation in joint actions from early in life

Neural correlates of action perception at the onset of functional grasping

Event-related potentials were recorded while infants observe congruent or incongruent grasping actions at the age when organized grasping first emerges (4-6 months of age). We demonstrate that the event-related potential component P400 encodes the congruency of power grasps at the age of 6 months (Experiment 1) and in 5-month-old infants that have developed the ability to use power grasps (Experiment 2). This effect does not extend to precision grasps, which infants cannot perform (Experiment 3). Our findings suggest that infants' encoding of the relationship between an object and a grasping hand (the action-perception link) is highly specialized to actions and manual configurations of actions that infants are able to perfor

Building Machines That Learn and Think Like People

Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has renewed interest in building systems that learn and think like people. Many advances have come from using deep neural networks trained end-to-end in tasks such as object recognition, video games, and board games, achieving performance that equals or even beats humans in some respects. Despite their biological inspiration and performance achievements, these systems differ from human intelligence in crucial ways. We review progress in cognitive science suggesting that truly human-like learning and thinking machines will have to reach beyond current engineering trends in both what they learn, and how they learn it. Specifically, we argue that these machines should (a) build causal models of the world that support explanation and understanding, rather than merely solving pattern recognition problems; (b) ground learning in intuitive theories of physics and psychology, to support and enrich the knowledge that is learned; and (c) harness compositionality and learning-to-learn to rapidly acquire and generalize knowledge to new tasks and situations. We suggest concrete challenges and promising routes towards these goals that can combine the strengths of recent neural network advances with more structured cognitive models.Comment: In press at Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Open call for commentary proposals (until Nov. 22, 2016). https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/information/calls-for-commentary/open-calls-for-commentar

Knowing who likes who: The early developmental basis of coalition understanding

Group biases based on broad category membership appear early in human development. However, like many other primates humans inhabit social worlds also characterised by small groups of social coalitions which are not demarcated by visible signs or social markers. A critical cognitive challenge for a young child is thus how to extract information concerning coalition structure when coalitions are dynamic and may lack stable and outwardly visible cues to membership. Therefore, the ability to decode behavioural cues of affiliations present in everyday social interactions between individuals would have conferred powerful selective advantages during our evolution. This would suggest that such an ability may emerge early in life, however, little research has investigated the developmental origins of such processing. The present paper will review recent empirical research which indicates that in the first 2 years of life infants achieve a host of social-cognitive abilities that make them well adapted to processing coalition-affiliations of others. We suggest that such an approach can be applied to better understand the origins of intergroup attitudes and biases. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Why do infants imitate selectively? Neural correlates of infants’ action understanding in the head-touch paradigm

Imitation is an important social learning mechanism for young infants exploring the world. Interestingly, infants do not imitate every action they observe – they rather do so selectively. Fourteen-month-olds predominantly imitated an unusual and inefficient action (turning on a lamp with one’s forehead) when the model’s hands were free compared to when the model’s hands were occupied (Gergely et al., 2002). Behavioral scientists have proposed contrasting explanatory accounts, differing with regard to the assumed level of infants’ cognitive abilities. Rational-imitation accounts suggest that infants selectively imitate unusual actions because they are surprised by the inefficiency of the action (Gergely & Csibra, 2003). In contrast, non-rational imitation accounts propose that selective imitation depends on more basic factors such as motor abilities (Paulus et al., 2011a,b). The integrative model by Zmyj and Buttelmann (2014) represents the first attempt to put together these opposing theories. Both accounts may operate on different processing levels. Bottom-up processes are related to non-rational imitation accounts, whereas top-down processing is based on the assumptions of the rational-imitation accounts. Despite the large body of behavioral research on selective imitation, the question of what are the neural mechanisms underlying these processes remains unanswered. In my dissertation, I aimed to uncover the underlying cognitive processes during the observation of head-touch actions by recording infants’ neurophysiological responses in three empirical studies. To test the assumptions of the top-down processes linked to the rational-imitation accounts, I examined neural markers associated with violation of expectation (VOE) in an adaptation of the head-touch paradigm. Overall, results suggest that 12- to 14-month-old infants, but not 9-month-old infants, display VOE when observing a person performing an inefficient head touch. This VOE response is context-dependent and is elicited when the model’s hands are free but not when the hands are restrained. In Study 1, VOE has been linked to a reduction in mu power in response to the unexpected head touch. In Study 2, this finding was extended such that when 12- to 14-month-old infants observed an unexpected head touch, their brains responded with increased attentional engagement (enhanced Nc amplitude) and a detection of a semantic violation (N400 component). Finally, in Study 3, in the absence of contextual information, 1-year-olds discriminated between hand- and head-touch outcomes on the Nc component only. Thus, infants require information of the action context to detect semantic violations within the head-touch paradigm. To conclude, the studies presented in my dissertation have paved the way to further our understanding of infants’ action perception and observational learning. Understanding the neural mechanisms of infants’ action perception in more depth, will help us to adequately foster the ideal observational learning conditions of novel actions. The results of this dissertation suggest that presenting infants with surprising action means puts them in an optimal receptive state for knowledge acquisition

Sensorimotor representation learning for an "active self" in robots: A model survey

Safe human-robot interactions require robots to be able to learn how to behave appropriately in \sout{humans' world} \rev{spaces populated by people} and thus to cope with the challenges posed by our dynamic and unstructured environment, rather than being provided a rigid set of rules for operations. In humans, these capabilities are thought to be related to our ability to perceive our body in space, sensing the location of our limbs during movement, being aware of other objects and agents, and controlling our body parts to interact with them intentionally. Toward the next generation of robots with bio-inspired capacities, in this paper, we first review the developmental processes of underlying mechanisms of these abilities: The sensory representations of body schema, peripersonal space, and the active self in humans. Second, we provide a survey of robotics models of these sensory representations and robotics models of the self; and we compare these models with the human counterparts. Finally, we analyse what is missing from these robotics models and propose a theoretical computational framework, which aims to allow the emergence of the sense of self in artificial agents by developing sensory representations through self-exploration

The cognitive neuroscience of visual working memory

Visual working memory allows us to temporarily maintain and manipulate visual information in order to solve a task. The study of the brain mechanisms underlying this function began more than half a century ago, with Scoville and Milner’s (1957) seminal discoveries with amnesic patients. This timely collection of papers brings together diverse perspectives on the cognitive neuroscience of visual working memory from multiple fields that have traditionally been fairly disjointed: human neuroimaging, electrophysiological, behavioural and animal lesion studies, investigating both the developing and the adult brain

Sensorimotor Representation Learning for an “Active Self” in Robots: A Model Survey

Safe human-robot interactions require robots to be able to learn how to behave appropriately in spaces populated by people and thus to cope with the challenges posed by our dynamic and unstructured environment, rather than being provided a rigid set of rules for operations. In humans, these capabilities are thought to be related to our ability to perceive our body in space, sensing the location of our limbs during movement, being aware of other objects and agents, and controlling our body parts to interact with them intentionally. Toward the next generation of robots with bio-inspired capacities, in this paper, we first review the developmental processes of underlying mechanisms of these abilities: The sensory representations of body schema, peripersonal space, and the active self in humans. Second, we provide a survey of robotics models of these sensory representations and robotics models of the self; and we compare these models with the human counterparts. Finally, we analyze what is missing from these robotics models and propose a theoretical computational framework, which aims to allow the emergence of the sense of self in artificial agents by developing sensory representations through self-exploration.Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001659Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001659Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001659Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001659Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001659Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001659Projekt DEALPeer Reviewe

Development of the Mu Rhythm: Understanding Function Through Translational Research

The incidental discovery of mirror neurons (MN) has renewed interest in motor theories of development and has sparked considerable debate as to the existence and potential function of mirror neurons in humans. The use of invasive single-cell recordings, however, has precluded identification of single MNs in humans or developmental populations of non-human primates. Non-invasive techniques, such as the modulation of the mu rhythm in the electroencephalogram (EEG) of young infants and children, have demonstrated the existence of an action observation/execution matching system in humans. Moreover, the mu rhythm has become an effective tool for addressing questions of MN system ontogeny in other species. The aim of this project is to address two questions that have thus far remained untested. The goal of study one is to address the question of whether or not we can identify activation of the human action observation/execution system under conditions in which the participants cannot see themselves executing a grasping action. Evidence from study one further validates our EEG measures as representing activation of the putative human MN system. The goal of study two is to examine the origins of MNs in 3-day-old mother- and nursery-reared infant rhesus macaques and the extent to which differential experience may contribute to the MN system during episodes of neonatal imitation. The results of study one demonstrated activation of the putative human MN system to actions completed in the absence of visual feedback in both human adults and infants. The magnitude of mu rhythm activity in infants was significantly less than in the adults suggesting a role of experience in the formation of the putative human MN system. The results from study two further emphasized the role of early experience showing significantly greater modulation of the mu rhythm in the mother-reared compared to the nursery-reared infants to the observation of socio-affiliative facial gestures. The evidence of studies one and two are discussed within a developmental framework of ongoing behavioral development and highlight the role experience plays, not in the foundation of, but rather the elaboration of the MN system