Exploring Mechanisms of Cognitive and Behavioural Development in Humans and Machines

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During the developmental process in humans, qualitatively new behaviours are learnt by using simple abilities as a basis for learning more complex ones. This progressive increase in competence, provided by development, may be essential to make tractable the process of acquiring the higher-level cognitive and behavioural abilities observed in adults. Similarly, development could make tractable the creation of more intelligent machines, and specifically robots. Current methodologies for designing robot controllers depend on the prespecification of the rules governing the robot's behaviour. However, such predefinition relies on a significant design effort or on prolonged search and testing time. This makes prespecification intractable for a complex robot or one performing a complex task or operating in a complex environment. Furthermore, the resulting control system tends to be applicable only to the particular problem it was developed to solve and is brittle in the event of any unforeseen circumstances. These problems could be resolved by providing the robot with the ability to adapt the rules it follows and to autonomously create new rules for controlling behaviour. Developmental approaches could thus provide robots with a strategy for discovering how to behave and may be a practical necessity for producing robots capable of operating successfully in the real world. This project thus aims to explore the neural mechanisms underlying the developmental process in biology in order to extract appropriate computational mechanisms that could be used to implement a similar developmental process in a robot. Achieving this objective will not only provide mechanisms appropriate for creating more adaptive and autonomous robots but will also provide valuable insights into human development.