We propose ongoing emergence as a core concept in epigenetic robotics. Ongoing emergence refers to the continuous development and integration of new skills and is exhibited when six criteria are satisfied: (1) continuous skill acquisition, (2) incorporation of new skills with existing skills, (3) autonomous development of values and goals, (4) bootstrapping of initial skills, (5) stability of skills, and (6) reproducibility. In this paper we: (a) provide a conceptual synthesis of ongoing emergence based on previous theorizing, (b) review current research in epigenetic robotics in light of ongoing emergence, (c) provide prototypical examples of ongoing emergence from infant development, and (d) outline computational issues relevant to creating robots exhibiting ongoing emergence. 1.

This position paper proposes that the study of embodied cognitive agents, such as humanoid robots, can advance our understanding of the cognitive development of complex sensorimotor, linguistic and social learning skills. This in turn will benefit the design of cognitive robots capable of learning to handle and manipulate objects and tools autonomously, to cooperate and communicate with other robots and humans, and to adapt their abilities to changing internal, environmental, and social conditions. Four key areas of research challenges are discussed, specifically for the issues related to the understanding of: (i) how agents learn and represent compositional actions; (ii) how agents learn and represent compositional lexicons; (iii) the dynamics of social interaction and learning; and (iv) how compositional action and language representations are integrated to bootstrap the cognitive system. The review of specific issues and progress in these areas is then translated into a practical roadmap based on a series of milestones. These milestones provide a possible set of cognitive robotics goals and test-scenarios, thus acting as a research roadmap for future work on cognitive developmental robotics.

The paper provides a summary of our recent research on preverbal infants (using violation-of-expectation and observational learning paradigms) demonstrating that one-year-olds interpret and draw systematic inferences about other's goal-directed actions, and can rely on such inferences when imitating other's actions or emulating their goals. To account for these findings it is proposed that oneyear -olds apply a non-mentalistic action interpretational system, the 'teleological stance' that represents actions by relating relevant aspects of reality (action, goal-state, and situational constraints) through the principle of rational action, which assumes that actions function to realize goal-states by the most efficient means available in the actor's situation. The

In two studies, the authors investigated 2- and 3-year-old children’s awareness of the normative structure of conventional games. In the target conditions, an experimenter showed a child how to play a simple rule game. After the child and the experimenter had played for a while, a puppet came (controlled by a 2nd experimenter), asked to join in, and then performed an action that constituted a mistake in the game. In control conditions, the puppet performed the exact same action as in the experimental conditions, but the context was different such that this act did not constitute a mistake. Children’s normative responses to the puppet’s acts (e.g., protest, critique, or teaching) were scored. Both age groups performed more normative responses in the target than in the control conditions, but the 3-year-olds did so on a more explicit level. These studies demonstrate in a particularly strong way that even very young children have some grasp of the normative structure of conventional activities.

The author reviews reemerging coconstructive conceptions of development and recent empirical findings of developmental plasticity at different levels spanning several fields of developmental and life sciences. A cross-level dynamic biocultural coconstructive framework is endorsed to understand cognitive and behavioral development across the life span. This framework integrates main conceptions of earlier views into a unifying frame, viewing the dynamics of life span development as occurring simultaneously within different time scales (i.e., moment-to-moment microgenesis, life span ontogeny, and human phylogeny) and encompassing multiple levels (i.e., neurobiological, cognitive, behavioral, and sociocultural). Viewed through this metatheoretical framework, new insights of potential interfaces for reciprocal cultural and experiential influences to be integrated with behavioral genetics and cognitive neuroscience research can be more easily prescribed. Metaphorically speaking, two related pendulums, one swinging back and forth from nature to nurture and the other from brain to mind, have been running the clocks of developmental and cognitive inquiries for centuries. Instead of polarizing toward either end, this review of recent advances in life and developmental sciences

This book is about the interface between natural language and the sensorimotor system. It is obvious that there is an interface between language and sensorimotor cognition, because we can talk about what we see and do. The main proposal in the book is that the interface is more direct than is commonly assumed. To argue for this proposal I focus on a simple concrete episode—a man grabbing a cup—which can be reported in a simple transitive sentence (e.g. the English sentence The man grabbed a cup). In the first part of the book I present a detailed model of the sensorimotor processes involved in experiencing this episode, both as the agent bringing it about and as an observer watching it happen. The model draws on a large body of research in neuroscience and psychology. I also present a model of the syntactic structure of the associated transitive sentence, developed within the entirely separate discipline of theoretical linguistics. This latter model is a version of Chomsky’s ‘Minimalist ’ syntactic theory, which assumes that a sentence reporting the episode has the same underlying syntactic structure (called ‘logical form’) regardless of which language it is in. My main proposal is that these two independently motivated models are in fact closely

Deacon's (1997) book is an interesting attempt to explain the critical aspects of the evolution of language as the learning of symbolic relationships. Deacon blurs the traditional distinction between syntax and semantics by arguing that the meaning of symbols is primarily determined via the combinatorial relations between symbols, and only secondarily via an indexical relation between a symbol and a referent (Deacon 1997, Ch. 3). However, this account of how acquisition of symbols involves multiple hierarchies of associative learning has proved rather difficult to understand (Hurford 1997), and even more difficult to incorporate into an explicit representational model. In this article, we want to use Deacon's theory as a platform for a more elaborated and precise model of symbol learning. Our model will be presented in rough phylogenetic order, and will contain only those cognitive elements that are minimally required for the learning of symbols. These mechanisms

Abstract—Joint attention – the idea that humans make inferences from observable behaviors of other humans by attending to the objects and events that these others humans attend to – has been recognized as a critical component in human-robot interactions. While various HRI studies showed that having robots to behave in ways that support human recognition of joint attention leads to better behavioral outcomes on the human side, there are no studies that investigate the detailed time course of interactive joint attention processes. In this paper, we present the results from an HRI study that investigates the exact time course of human multi-modal attentional processes during an HRI word learning task in an unprecedented way. Using novel data analysis techniques, we are able to demonstrate that the temporal details of human attentional behavior are critical for understanding human expectations of joint attention in HRI and that failing to do so can force humans into assuming unnatural behaviors. Keywords-human-robot interaction; joint attention I.

Fourteen- and 18-month-old infants observed an adult experiencing each of 2 objects (experienced objects) and then leaving the room; the infant then played with a 3rd object while the adult was gone (unexperienced object). The adult interacted with the 2 experienced objects in 1 of 3 ways: by (a) sharing them with the infant in an episode of joint engagement, (b) actively manipulating and inspecting them on his or her own as the infant watched (individual engagement), or (c) looking at them from a distance as the infant played with them (onlooking). As evidenced in a selection task, infants of both ages knew which objects had been experienced by the adult in the joint engagement condition, only the 18-montholds knew this in the individual engagement condition, and infants at neither age knew this in the onlooking condition. These results suggest that infants are 1st able to determine what adults know (have experienced) on the basis of their direct, triadic engagements with them.

This thesis is about the reconciliation of realistic views of rationality with inferential-intentional theories of communication. Grice (1957; 1975) argued that working out what a speaker meant by an utterance is a matter of inferring the speaker’s intentions on the presumption that she is acting rationally. This is abductive inference: inference to the best explanation for the utterance. Thus an utterance both rationalises and causes the interpretation the hearer constructs. Human rationality is bounded because of our ‘finitary predicament’: we have limited time and resources for computation (Simon, 1957b; Cherniak, 1981). This raises questions about the explanatory status of inferential-intentional pragmatic theories. Gricean derivations of speakers’ intentions seem costly, and generally hearers are not aware of performing explicit reasoning. Utterance interpretation is typically fast and automatic. Is utterance interpretation a species of reasoning, or does the hearer merely act as if reasoning? Within the framework of cognitive science, mental processing is understood as transitions between mental representations. I develop a traditional view of rationality as reasoning ability, where this is essentially the ability to make transitions that preserve rational acceptability. Following Grice (2001), I claim that there is a ‘hard way’ and a ‘quick way’ of reasoning. Work on bounded rationality suggests that much cognitive work is done by heuristics, processes that exploit environmental structure to solve problems at much lower cost than fully explicit calculations. I look at the properties of heuristics that find solutions to open-ended problems such as abductive inference, particularly sequential search heuristics with aspiration-level stopping rules. I draw on relevance theory’s view that the comprehension procedure is a heuristic which exploits environmental regularities due to utterances being offers of information (Sperber & Wilson, 1986). This kind of heuristic, I argue, is the ‘quick way’ that reasoning proceeds in utterance interpretation.