Objective
By spontaneously generating and also observing/imitating manipulative gestures, infants quickly learn how to interact with their environment. At the same time, communicative abilities develop leading to a more complex use of speech.
Are these motor abilities developing independently? Or are there fundamentally similar mechanisms in the development of perception and production, for both speech and manipulation?
We believe that the latter is the case. This project represents an ambitious attempt to investigate the parallel development of manipulatory and speech
gestures from a multi-disciplinary perspective. Experts in Robotics, Neuroscience, and Child-Development will collaborate to build an embodied artifact, which will develop its motor capabilities both in manipulation and speech.
The hypothesis deals with a scientific finding indicating that actions are represented more in terms of goals then in terms of procedures. This finding brings to a possible unified theory underlying both manipulation and speech, apart from obvious differences relative to effectors and sensory modalities involved. Moreover, action representations can be addressed not only during execution but also by the perception of action-related stimuli. Consequently, production and perception will be investigated at the same time. The focus will be, therefore, on a combined Perception-Production model that develops incrementally, finally leading to a system that learns to:
Perceive and produce simple manipulatory gestures and words
Infer the goal of gestures, and meaning of words.
Our approach will give us the possibility to experimentally manipulate the development process on the basis of the experiments and theories reached by the Neuroscience partners. At the same time, theoretical questions and implementation issues arising during artifact development will challenge neuroscience labs and their exploration of living systems.
Fields of science
Topic(s)
Call for proposal
FP6-2003-NEST-A
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
STREP - Specific Targeted Research ProjectCoordinator
GENOVA
Italy