Sensorimotor Contingencies as a Key Drive of Development: From Babies to Robots

Abstract

Much current work in robotics focuses on the development of robots capable of autonomous unsupervised learning. An essential prerequisite for such learning to be possible is that the agent should be sensitive to the link between its actions and the consequences of its actions, called sensorimotor contingencies. This sensitivity, and more particularly its role as a key drive of development, has been widely studied by developmental psychologists. However, the results of these studies may not necessarily be accessible or intelligible to roboticians. In this paper, we review the main experimental data demonstrating the role of sensitivity to sensorimotor contingencies in infants’ acquisition of four fundamental motor and cognitive abilities: body knowledge, memory, generalization, and goal-directedness. We relate this data from developmental psychology to work in robotics, highlighting the links between these two domains of research. In the last part of the article we present a blueprint architecture demonstrating how exploitation of sensitivity to sensorimotor contingencies, combined with the notion of “goal,” allows an agent to develop new sensorimotor skills. This architecture can be used to guide the design of specific computational models, and also to possibly envisage new empirical experiments.

Autonomous Reinforcement Learning of Multiple Interrelated Tasks

“…With a certain probability use the new policy parameters, otherwise randomly select a policy π g,φg,k among those, if any, with a competence ≥ transf er threshold; 2) Goal discovery: As in other versions of the GRAIL architecture [20], [39], the system is endowed with a mechanism to autonomously discover "interesting" states and store them as possible goals: here we use a simple, biologically inspired [46], [47] is detected for goal g, it is added to the set of knowncontexts Φ g for that goal, and a new policy π g,φg,n+1 associated to the goal g is added to the repertoire of the system as a new expert (see sec. IV-B6 and IV-B7).…”

Discovering Schema-Based Action Sequences Through Play in Situated Humanoid Robots

“…The presented architecture addresses the following developmental learning aspects desired for any psychologically plausible system [46]. It incorporates sensorimotor contingencies' autonomous discovery and maintains a memory that allows their reusability.…”

Sensorimotor Research Utilising Immersive Virtual Reality: A Pilot Study with Children and Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorders

“…These are early symptoms that can be associated with a broad range of cascading delays and impairments [4]. Early motor development might also be affected, as it has been hypothesised that the acquisition of body knowledge develops based on our sensitivity to sensorimotor contingencies (action-consequences correspondence) and multisensory contingencies (correspondence between events in different sensory modalities) [5]. When learning a new movement, there is evidence that children with ASD are less influenced by visual feedback [6] and Brain Sci.…”