Humanoid infers Archimedes' principle: understanding physical relations and object affordances through cumulative learning experiences.

ABSTRACT: Emerging studies indicate that several species such as corvids, apes and children solve 'The Crow and the Pitcher' task (from Aesop's Fables) in diverse conditions. Hidden beneath this fascinating paradigm is a fundamental question: by cumulatively interacting with different objects, how can an agent abstract the underlying cause-effect relations to predict and creatively exploit potential affordances of novel objects in the context of sought goals? Re-enacting this Aesop's Fable task on a humanoid within an open-ended 'learning-prediction-abstraction' loop, we address this problem and (i) present a brain-guided neural framework that emulates rapid one-shot encoding of ongoing experiences into a long-term memory and (ii) propose four task-agnostic learning rules (elimination, growth, uncer

SUBMITTER: Bhat AA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4971221 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature