Emergence of eye–hand coordination as a creative process in an artificial developmental agent

Based on Piaget’s theory of cognitive development and an extension of the Engagement-Reflection model of creativity, the Developmental Engagement-Reflection (Dev E-R) model characterizes the early cognitive development of an agent as a creative activity. In its first version, Dev E-R uses an agent that can see and move its head; through interactions with its environment, it is able to develop elaborated behaviors consistent with Piaget’s ideas. This work describes an advancement of our model. We give our agent a hand (tactile sensor) so it can detect the presence and features of an object in its environment; we also study the necessary mechanisms to coordinate its vision with the sense of touch. We report the behavior of the agent when it is granted the capacity of touching without seeing (i.e. the agent was “blind”) and when both skills, touch and sight, come together. For such purpose, we place an agent in a virtual environment and let it perform in different contexts. We analyze how new knowledge structures results from prior experiences and interactions with the environment. The outcomes from the experiments reveal that it learns new skills associated with eye–hand coordination. We observe that the arising developmental behavior resembles some of the features reported by Jean Piaget.