Epigenetic Robotics Helps Researchers Study Cognition, Ties Posture to Learning
A robot is taught to distinguish between two objects as part of research on the effect of body posture on infant learning. Photo: University of Plymouth.
A cognitive scientist from Indiana University Bloomington College along with a roboticist from the University of Plymouth and a developmental psychologist from the University of Madison-Wisconsin have developed a new approach to studying the way words or memories of physical objects are tied to body position by using robots to model the learning process.
“This study shows that the body plays a role in early object name learning and how toddlers use the body’s position in space to connect ideas,” says Linda Smith, lead researcher on the study. “The creation of a robot model for infant learning has far-reaching implications for how the brains of young people work.”
The research published this week, “Posture Affects How Robots and Infants Map Words to Objects,” used robots and infants to examine the role body position played in the brain’s ability to map names to objects.
In one experiment the robot was shown an object to its left and then another to its right while the object’s name was shown and spoken. This process was repeated to form an association between the two objects and the differing postures. Then, with no objects around, the robot was directed to look to where the object on the left was and given a command to elicit the same posture as before. Both objects were then placed in the same locations without being named followed by being placed in different locations and named again. This caused the robot to turn and reach for the object associated with the name.
The robot successfully identified a connection between an object and its name in 20 repeat trials, however, in a later test where the target object and another object were placed in both locations to remove an association with a specific posture, the robot failed to recognize the target.
The data from experiments with infants aged 12 to 18 months had only slight differences to the robot and also indicated the importance of body position in connecting names to objects, according to an Indiana University news release.
These new insights rely on the field of epigenetic robots in which researchers create robots that learn and develop like children through interaction with their environment.
“These experiments may provide a new way to investigate the way cognition is connected to the body, as well as new evidence that mental entities, such as thoughts, words and representations of objects, which seem to have no spatial or bodily components, first take shape through spatial relationships of the body within the surrounding world,” says Smith.
