Time: 4:00pm - 12:00am Venue: Engineering Building Engineering Building Queen Mary, University of London Mile End London E1 4NS
The Assembly, Tuning, and Transfer of Action Systems in Infants and Robots
Can experiments with machines inform theory in infant motor development? I will present a number of studies in which we question (1) how the interactions among the parts of a system, including the nervous and musculoskeletal systems and the forces acting on the body, induce organizational changes in the whole, and (2) how exploratory behavior and selective informational signals at the time scale of skill learning may allow behavior to become stabilized at the longer time scale of development. I will describe how three generative principles, inspired from developmental biology and shown to underlie the dynamics of infants learning to bounce in a Jolly Jumper, were broken into a set of mechanisms suitable for controlling a robotic system and resulted in a similar developmental profile.
Dr Luc Berthouze, http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/lb203/
Eng 2.07, 4pm Tuesday 9 July