Olivier Georgeon's research blog—also known as the story of little Ernest, the developmental agent.

Keywords: situated cognition, constructivist learning, intrinsic motivation, bottom-up self-programming, individuation, theory of enaction, developmental learning, artificial sense-making, biologically inspired cognitive architectures, agnostic agents (without ontological assumptions about the environment).

Saturday, January 28, 2012

Dynamic Local Space Memory

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This video shows the content of Ernesto's local space memory in the previous experiment. It gives a representation of what Ernesto knows about his surrounding environment. Objects appear as arcs because Ernesto ignores their thickness and only knows their average distance and their span in his visual field.

At each instant, Ernesto focuses his attention on a particular place in space represented by a point (most often magenta but sometimes black, red, or pink). Additionally, Ernesto flashes yellow when he eats a fish and pink when he cuddles with Ernestine.

Ernesto's sensory system is sensible to the relative movement of the place of attention. This relative movement is represented by a speed vector attached to the magenta point. This direct sensibility to relative movement is consistent with neuro-physiological theories such as Alain Berthoz's (1997).

This video shows that Ernest's attention is still very scattered. A more elaborated control of attention is probably needed.

Reference
Berthoz A. (1997) Le sens du mouvement. Odile Jacob: Paris.

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