A developmental robot is one that learns and practices autonomously in the real physical world by interacting with the environment through sensors and e#ectors, probably under human supervision. The study of developmental robots is motivated by the autonomous developmental process of higher animals and humans from infancy to adulthood. Our goal is to enable a robot to learn autonomously from real-world experiences. This paper presents a case study of a developmental robot developing its auditory related behaviors to follow human trainers' voice command. A learning architecture is proposed to resolve automatic representation generation and selective attention issues. Both simulation results and experiments on real robot are reported to show the e#ectiveness.

Artificial neural networks can model cortical local learning and signal processing, but they are not the brain, neither are many special purpose systems to which they contribute. Autonomous mental development models all or part of the brain (or the central nervous system) and how it develops and learns autonomously from infancy to adulthood. Like neural network research, such modeling aims to be biologically plausible. This paper discusses why autonomous development is necessary according to a concept called task muddiness. Then it introduces recent results for a series of research issues, including the new paradigm for autonomous development, mental architectures, developmental algorithm, a refined classification of types of machine learning, spatial complexity and time complexity. Finally, the paper presents some experimental results for applications, including: visionguided navigation, object finding, object-based attention (eye-pan), and attention-guided pre-reaching, four tasks which infants learn to perform early but very perceptually challenging for robots. Key words: cognitive development, autonomous learning, mental architecture, on-line learning, incremental learning, visual learning, working memory, long-term memory, self-organization, regression, autonomous navigation, attention selection, object recognition,

The field of children's testimony is in turmoil, but a resolution to seemingly intractable debates now appears attainable. In this review, we place the current disagreement in historical context and describe psychological and legal views of child witnesses held by scholars since the turn of the 20th century. Although there has been consistent interest in children's suggestibility over the past century, the past 15 years have been the most active in terms of the number of published studies and novel theorizing about the causal mechanisms that underpin the observed findings. A synthesis of this research posits three "families " of factors—cognitive, social, and biological—that must be considered if one is to understand seemingly contradictory interpretations of the findings. We conclude that there are reliable age differences in suggestibility but that even very young children are capable of recalling much that is forensically relevant. Findings are discussed in terms of the role of expert witnesses. Since the turn of the century, psycholegal scholars have examined the suggestibility of children's testimony in an effort to determine whether they would be credible witnesses. A major issue in this research concerns the degree to which heightened

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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

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This paper examines the evolution of the focus of user interface research and development from the first production of commercial computer systems in the 1950s through the present. The term “user interface ” was not needed in the beginning, when most users were engineers and programmers; it may again become inappropriate when more applications are written for groups than for individuals. But there is a continuity to the outward movement of the computer’s interface to its external environment, from hardware to software to increasingly higher-level cognitive capabilities and finally to social processes. As the focus shifts, the approaches to design and the skills required of practitioners changes. In this paper five foci or levels of development are identified. Most development today is positioned in the third level and considerable research is directed at the fourth. Some attention is now being given to the fifth: repositioning the interface in the work group or organization itself. Work at the different levels is not entirely independent, so establishing a comprehensive framework may enable us to position existing research and development efforts and plan future work more effectively.

Abstract: Constructivist pedagogy draws on Piaget’s developmental theory. Because Piaget depicted the emergence of formal reasoning skills in adolescence as part of the normal developmental pattern, many constructivists have assumed that intrinsic motivation is possible for all academic tasks. This paper argues that Piaget’s concept of a formal operational stage has not been empirically verified and that the cognitive skills associated with that stage are in fact “biologically secondary abilities ” (Geary and Bjorklund, 2000) culturally determined abilities that are difficult to acquire. Thus, it is unreasonable to expect that intrinsic motivation will suffice for most students for most higher level academic tasks. In addition, a case is made that educational psychology must incorporate the insights of evolutionary psychology.

Public Schools for cooperation in data collection and management and the Department of Early

Abstract—This is a theoretical, modeling, and algorithmic paper about the spatial aspect of brain-like information processing, modeled by the Developmental Network (DN) model. The new brain architecture allows the external environment (including teachers) to interact with the sensory ends S and the motor ends M of the skull-closed brain B through development. It does not allow the human programmer to hand-pick extra-body concepts or to handcraft the concept boundaries inside the brain B. Mathematically, the brain spatial processing performs real-time mapping from S(t)×B(t)×M(t) to S(t+1)×B(t+1)×M(t+1), through network updates, where the contents of S, B, M all emerge from experience. Using its limited resource, the brain does increasingly better through experience. A new principle is that the effector ends in M serve as hubs for concept learning and abstraction. The effector ends B serve also as input and the sensory ends S serve also as output. As DN embodiments, the Where-What Networks (WWNs) present three major function novelties — new concept abstraction, concept as emergent goals, and goal-directed perception. The WWN series appears to be the first general purpose emergent systems for detecting and recognizing multiple objects in complex backgrounds. Among others, the most significant new mechanism is general-purpose top-down attention. Index Terms—Mental architecture, cortical representation,