What do we learn about development from baby robots?

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 mechanisms at multiple spatio-temporal scales. The concepts of "innate" or "acquired" are not any more adequate tools for explanations, which call for a shift from reductionist to systemic accounts. To address this challenge, building and experimenting with robots modeling the growing infant brain and body is crucial. Systemic explanations of pattern formation in sensorimotor, cognitive and social development, viewed as a complex dynamical system, require the use of formal models based on mathematics, algorithms and robots. Formulating hypothesis about development using such models, and exploring them through experiments, allows us to consider in detail the interaction between many mechanisms and parameters. This complements traditional experimental methods in psychology and neuroscience where only a few variables can be studied at the same time. Furthermore, the use of robots is of particular importance. The laws of physics generate everywhere around us spontaneous patterns in the inorganic world. They also strongly impact the living, and in particular constrain and guide infant development through the properties of its (changing) body in interaction with the physical environment. Being able to consider the body as an experimental variable, something that can be systematically changed in order to study the impact on skill formation, has been a dream to many developmental scientists. This is today becoming possible with developmental robotics

Affordances in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Robotics: A Survey

The concept of affordances appeared in psychology during the late 60s as an alternative perspective on the visual perception of the environment. It was revolutionary in the intuition that the way living beings perceive the world is deeply influenced by the actions they are able to perform. Then, across the last 40 years, it has influenced many applied fields, e.g., design, human-computer interaction, computer vision, and robotics. In this paper, we offer a multidisciplinary perspective on the notion of affordances. We first discuss the main definitions and formalizations of the affordance theory, then we report the most significant evidence in psychology and neuroscience that support it, and finally we review the most relevant applications of this concept in robotics

Symbol Emergence in Robotics: A Survey

Humans can learn the use of language through physical interaction with their environment and semiotic communication with other people. It is very important to obtain a computational understanding of how humans can form a symbol system and obtain semiotic skills through their autonomous mental development. Recently, many studies have been conducted on the construction of robotic systems and machine-learning methods that can learn the use of language through embodied multimodal interaction with their environment and other systems. Understanding human social interactions and developing a robot that can smoothly communicate with human users in the long term, requires an understanding of the dynamics of symbol systems and is crucially important. The embodied cognition and social interaction of participants gradually change a symbol system in a constructive manner. In this paper, we introduce a field of research called symbol emergence in robotics (SER). SER is a constructive approach towards an emergent symbol system. The emergent symbol system is socially self-organized through both semiotic communications and physical interactions with autonomous cognitive developmental agents, i.e., humans and developmental robots. Specifically, we describe some state-of-art research topics concerning SER, e.g., multimodal categorization, word discovery, and a double articulation analysis, that enable a robot to obtain words and their embodied meanings from raw sensory--motor information, including visual information, haptic information, auditory information, and acoustic speech signals, in a totally unsupervised manner. Finally, we suggest future directions of research in SER.Comment: submitted to Advanced Robotic

On Neuromechanical Approaches for the Study of Biological Grasp and Manipulation

Biological and robotic grasp and manipulation are undeniably similar at the level of mechanical task performance. However, their underlying fundamental biological vs. engineering mechanisms are, by definition, dramatically different and can even be antithetical. Even our approach to each is diametrically opposite: inductive science for the study of biological systems vs. engineering synthesis for the design and construction of robotic systems. The past 20 years have seen several conceptual advances in both fields and the quest to unify them. Chief among them is the reluctant recognition that their underlying fundamental mechanisms may actually share limited common ground, while exhibiting many fundamental differences. This recognition is particularly liberating because it allows us to resolve and move beyond multiple paradoxes and contradictions that arose from the initial reasonable assumption of a large common ground. Here, we begin by introducing the perspective of neuromechanics, which emphasizes that real-world behavior emerges from the intimate interactions among the physical structure of the system, the mechanical requirements of a task, the feasible neural control actions to produce it, and the ability of the neuromuscular system to adapt through interactions with the environment. This allows us to articulate a succinct overview of a few salient conceptual paradoxes and contradictions regarding under-determined vs. over-determined mechanics, under- vs. over-actuated control, prescribed vs. emergent function, learning vs. implementation vs. adaptation, prescriptive vs. descriptive synergies, and optimal vs. habitual performance. We conclude by presenting open questions and suggesting directions for future research. We hope this frank assessment of the state-of-the-art will encourage and guide these communities to continue to interact and make progress in these important areas

Precis of neuroconstructivism: how the brain constructs cognition

Neuroconstructivism: How the Brain Constructs Cognition proposes a unifying framework for the study of cognitive development that brings together (1) constructivism (which views development as the progressive elaboration of increasingly complex structures), (2) cognitive neuroscience (which aims to understand the neural mechanisms underlying behavior), and (3) computational modeling (which proposes formal and explicit specifications of information processing). The guiding principle of our approach is context dependence, within and (in contrast to Marr [1982]) between levels of organization. We propose that three mechanisms guide the emergence of representations: competition, cooperation, and chronotopy; which themselves allow for two central processes: proactivity and progressive specialization. We suggest that the main outcome of development is partial representations, distributed across distinct functional circuits. This framework is derived by examining development at the level of single neurons, brain systems, and whole organisms. We use the terms encellment, embrainment, and embodiment to describe the higher-level contextual influences that act at each of these levels of organization. To illustrate these mechanisms in operation we provide case studies in early visual perception, infant habituation, phonological development, and object representations in infancy. Three further case studies are concerned with interactions between levels of explanation: social development, atypical development and within that, developmental dyslexia. We conclude that cognitive development arises from a dynamic, contextual change in embodied neural structures leading to partial representations across multiple brain regions and timescales, in response to proactively specified physical and social environment

Educational Robotics and Computational Thinking in Elementary School Students

This study examined the role of educational robotics in fostering computational thinking in elementary settings, both in classrooms and extracurricular programs. Among growing concerns over K–12 students’ computational thinking deficits, the research evaluated the impact of Lego EV3 and VEX IQ platforms. Data was sourced from lesson plans, student work surveys, and teacher interviews and then subjected to thematic analysis using a qualitative approach. The participants were Texas educators engaged in robotics instruction, even though specific robotics statistics are absent in the Texas Education Agency. Instructional strategies varied from hands-on experiences to translating mathematical concepts into robotic actions. A key finding was robotics’ role in advancing computational and critical thinking skills. Teachers believed that robotics went beyond a mere science, technology, engineering, and mathematics introduction, promoting advanced computational thinking and linking creativity to real-world application. Robotics challenges were seen to enhance students’ computational and critical thinking capabilities. The study drew from constructionism theory, which promotes learning through action and knowledge creation. In conclusion, educational robotics, reinforced by constructionism, is essential for equipping students for a technologically advanced future. Early exposure to robotics equips elementary students with vital 21st-century skills, enhancing their science, technology, engineering, and mathematics preparedness

Behavior-grounded multi-sensory object perception and exploration by a humanoid robot

Infants use exploratory behaviors to learn about the objects around them. Psychologists have theorized that behaviors such as touching, pressing, lifting, and dropping enable infants to form grounded object representations. For example, scratching an object can provide information about its roughness, while lifting it can provide information about its weight. In a sense, the exploratory behavior acts as a ``question\u27\u27 to the object, which is subsequently ``answered by the sensory stimuli produced during the execution of the behavior. In contrast, most object representations used by robots today rely solely on computer vision or laser scan data, gathered through passive observation. Such disembodied approaches to robotic perception may be useful for recognizing an object using a 3D model database, but nevertheless, will fail to infer object properties that cannot be detected using vision alone. To bridge this gap, this dissertation introduces a framework for object perception and exploration in which the robot\u27s representation of objects is grounded in its own sensorimotor experience with them. In this framework, an object is represented by sensorimotor contingencies that span a diverse set of exploratory behaviors and sensory modalities. The results from several large-scale experimental studies show that the behavior-grounded object representation enables a robot to solve a wide variety of tasks including recognition of objects based on the stimuli that they produce, object grouping and sorting, and learning category labels that describe objects and their properties

“He will see my drawing and we will play blindman’s bluff together” Overcoming communication barriers in a multicultural kindergarten classroom

Peer interactions and play have been highlighted as key factors for immigrant children’s smooth transition and participation in a new language and cultural context. Taking a sociocultural stance towards children’s participation in early childhood education (ECE) and considering that their communication acts are always multimodal, in this study, we sought to examine peer interactions during play in a Greek multicultural kindergarten with high concentrations of immigrant and refugee students. Data derived from systematic observation of free play activities, semi-structured interviews, and a drawing-telling activity aimed to figure out all children’s ways of acting and communicating. Findings provide further evidence on how material and embodied signs function as means that mediate play and contribute to sustained interactions between children with different linguistic backgrounds, while they reveal the potential of drawing to function as communicational means in multilingual settings.Peer interactions and play have been highlighted as key factors for immigrant children’s smooth transition and participation in a new language and cultural context. Taking a sociocultural stance towards children’s participation in early childhood education (ECE) and considering that their communication acts are always multimodal, in this study, we sought to examine peer interactions during play in a Greek multicultural kindergarten with high concentrations of immigrant and refugee students. Data derived from systematic observation of free play activities, semi-structured interviews, and a drawing-telling activity aimed to figure out all children’s ways of acting and communicating. Findings provide further evidence on how material and embodied signs function as means that mediate play and contribute to sustained interactions between children with different linguistic backgrounds, while they reveal the potential of drawing to function as communicational means in multilingual settings