Contingency Perception and Agency Measure in Visuo-Motor Spiking Neural Networks

Abstract

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 biological mechanism of spike timing-dependent plasticity, that synchronizes the neural dynamics almost everywhere in the central nervous system, constitutes the perfect algorithm to detect contingency in sensorimotor networks. The coherence or the dissonance in the sensorimotor information flow imparts then the agency level. In a head-neck-eyes robot, we replicate three developmental experiments illustrating how particular perceptual experiences can modulate the overall level of agency inside the system; i.e., 1) by adding a delay between proprioceptive and visual feedback information, 2) by facing a mirror, and 3) a person. We show that the system learns to discriminate animated objects (self-image and other persons) from other type of stimuli. This suggests a basic stage representing the self in relation to others from low-level sensorimotor processes. We discuss then the relevance of our findings with neurobiological evidences and development psychological observations for developmental robots.

Body Schema in Robotics: A Review

“…The former body of work employs cross-modal maps that are modified through Hebbian learning applied on individual modalities [96], [134]- [137]. The latter category comprises studies in which the acquired body representations are utilized to coordinate the robot's behavior [138]- [140]. Third, we will review the work by Kuniyoshi and Sangawa [141] where the emphasis is placed on the physical interaction between body and environment and on the effect of low-level (spinal) control.…”

Gain-field modulation mechanism in multimodal networks for spatial perception

“…This work pursues several models of the parieto-motor system on which we studied the contributions of motor and spatial development to social cognition [17]. In previous researches, we used spiking neural networks for the detection and learning of synchrony based on the mechanism of spike timing-dependent plasticity [18], either in robotic experiments or in computer simulations [19], [20]. Here, we investigate similar principles using this time the rank-order coding mechanism (ROC) exploited for its rapid spike-based processing [21].…”

Exploration Behaviors, Body Representations, and Simulation Processes for the Development of Cognition in Artificial Agents

“…Pitti et al (2009) proposed a mechanism of spike timing-dependent synaptic plasticity as a biologically plausible model for detecting contingency between multimodal events and for allowing a robotic agent to experience its own agency during motion.…”