Embodiment and physical coupling allow humans to use the world itself as a tool for organizing and manipulating knowledge. Integration allows humans to maximize the efficacy and accuracy of complementary sensory and motor systems. Developmental Organization Humans are not born with complete reasoning systems, complete motor systems, or even complete sensory systems. Instead, they undergo a process of development where they perform incrementally more difficult tasks in more complex environments en route to the adult state. Building systems developmentally facilitates learning both by providing a structured decomposition of skills and by gradually increasing the complexity of the task to match the competency of the system.
Development is an incremental process.
Behaviors and learned skills that have already been mastered prepare and enable the acquisition of more advanced behaviors by providing subskills and knowledge that can be re-used, by placing simplifying constraints on the acquisition, and by minimizing new information that must be acquired. In this progression, infants in later phases consistently demonstrate more sophisticated reaching strategies to retrieve a toy in more challenging scenarios. As the infant's reaching competency develops, later stages incrementally improve upon the competency afforded by the previous stages. Within our group, we have used a developmental approach to train the robot to reach for a visual target. We are also currently studying a developmental progression of basic social skills.