Generalisation, decision making, and embodiment effects in mental rotation: A neurorobotic architecture tested with a humanoid robot

Abstract

Mental rotation, a classic experimental paradigm of cognitive psychology, tests the capacity of humans to mentally rotate a seen object to decide if it matches a target object. In recent years, mental rotation has been investigated with brain imaging techniques to identify the brain areas involved. Mental rotation has also been investigated through the development of neural-network models, used to identify the specific mechanisms that underlie its process, and with neurorobotics models to investigate its embodied nature. Current models, however, have limited capacities to relate to neuro-scientific evidence, to generalise mental rotation to new objects, to suitably represent decision making mechanisms, and to allow the study of the effects of overt gestures on mental rotation. The work presented in this study overcomes these limitations by proposing a novel neurorobotic model that has a macro-architecture constrained by knowledge held on brain, encompasses a rather general mental rotation mechanism, and incorporates a biologically plausible decision making mechanism. The model was tested using the humanoid robot iCub in tasks requiring the robot to mentally rotate 2D geometrical images appearing on a computer screen. The results show that the robot gained an enhanced capacity to generalise mental rotation to new objects and to express the possible effects of overt movements of the wrist on mental rotation. The model also represents a further step in the identification of the embodied neural mechanisms that may underlie mental rotation in humans and might also give hints to enhance robots' planning capabilities.

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“…An increasing amount of empirical evidence supports embodied cognition views. Examples include changes in motor behavior or perceptual experience as a result of semantic processing [140–150], or changes in categorization [151, 152] and mental manipulations of objects [153, 154], that reflect sensory and motor experiences (see [141] for a recent review).…”

“…In this perspective, the off-line re-enactment of action, perception, and emotional processes, which is based on internally generated (not stimulus-dependent) brain dynamics [198], realizes higher cognitive functions such as planning and long-term decisions and also entrains the online sensorimotor processes that ultimately realize the planned courses of actions [9, 144, 145]. Supporting this idea is the fact that the neuronal systems for mental imagery and motor preparation are closely related [20, 146–148, 153, 154]. The conceptual and computational models summarized here only grasp the surface of the cortical-subcortical processes that support higher cognition.…”

Special Issue “On Defining Artificial Intelligence”—Commentaries and Author’s Response

“…This manipulation allows the brain to perform different operations on internal representations, for example abstraction over details or selection of specific parts of an object, so as to form the needed new representations starting from the acquired ones (these operations might also be closely linked to conscious processing (Baldassarre and Granato, 2019)). This internal manipulation of representations, at the basis of imagination (Seepanomwan et al, 2015) and problem solving, allows the brain to modify the previously acquired knowledge to produce the lacking knowledge needed to accomplish novel goals or familiar goals in novel conditions/domains.…”

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“…The view that the nervous system and the body in general are mediators of subjective experience is corroborated not only by philosophical speculation but also by an increasing body of empirical evidence (Gray et al 2002;Glenberg et al 2013). Recent studies on the role of bodily factors as mediators of cognitive processing have challenged the Cartesian hypothesis of a disembodied brain as the single processing unit of human cognition (Seepanomwan et al 2015;Krüger and Ebersbach 2017). Following these results, researchers have argued that extended accounts of cognition are epistemically better suited to describe human cognitive processing and the interaction between humans and machines (Ienca 2018).…”