Abstract
As well as having the ability to formulate models of the world capable of experimental falsification, it is evident that human cognitive capability embraces some degree of representational plasticity, having the scope (at least in infancy) to modify the primitives in terms of which the world is delineated. We hence employ the term ‘cognitive bootstrapping’ to refer to the autonomous updating of an embodied agent’s perceptual framework in response to the perceived requirements of the environment in such a way as to retain the ability to refine the environment model in a consistent fashion across perceptual changes.
We will thus argue that the concept of cognitive bootstrapping is epistemically ill-founded unless there exists an a priori percept/motor interrelation capable of maintaining an empirical distinction between the various possibilities of perceptual categorization and the inherent uncertainties of environment modeling.
As an instantiation of this idea, we shall specify a very general, logically-inductive model of perception-action learning capable of compact re-parameterization of the percept space. In consequence of the a priori percept/action coupling, the novel perceptual state transitions so generated always exist in bijective correlation with a set of novel action states, giving rise to the required empirical validation criterion for perceptual inferences. Environmental description is correspondingly accomplished in terms of progressively higher-level affordance conjectures which are likewise validated by exploratory action.
Application of this mechanism within simulated perception-action environments indicates that, as well as significantly reducing the size and specificity of the a priori perceptual parameter-space, the method can significantly reduce the number of iterations required for accurate convergence of the world-model. It does so by virtue of the active learning characteristics implicit in the notion of cognitive bootstrapping.
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Notes
- 1.
{P′ exp} is a subset of {P exp} since, in general, not all of the exploratory actions will result in percepts that could be regarded as intentional; for instance, if an action end-point is unstable.
- 2.
- 3.
Indeed, for a non-interacting cognitive agent, there are effectively no meaningful autonomously-derived criteria that can be applied to perceptual inferences in consequence of the fact that no non-arbitrary cost function capable of distinguishing between rival perceptual hypotheses exists a priori (cf Quine [37] on the ontological underdetermination problem).
- 4.
- 5.
Though, importantly, without the same guarantee of uniform sampling of the legitimate actions (see Conclusions).
- 6.
Indeed, in certain phenomenological models [45], this differential in actual and potential action capabilities constitutes the agent’s environment.
- 7.
Note that this supporting surface is different for each object, since differing objects slot into differing holes, with the holes acting as support-entities otherwise.
- 8.
In a more realistically complex cognitive environment it would be possible to eliminate the a priori awareness of the morphological correspondence between holes and shapes by resolving it into a suitable composite of the two perceptual categories of positional occupancy and spatial adjacency. In fact, these are more like the true Kantian a priori perceptual categories. (A priori in the sense of their being empirically undiscoverable, being rather the conditions of empirical discovery).
- 9.
Note that the predicates of the form not(…) do not generate output variables that can be meaningfully employed to address the percept space, and are hence indicated by dotted lines in figure 1 to denote their removal from the remapping process.
- 10.
The only permitted exception to this rule being predicates with mode declarations that specify only input variables (ie, those having the form modeb(1, p([ + variable type]))), such as hole{ _}shape{ _}match(A, B). In these cases, the predicate can be regarded as a variable-less terminating node of the directed acyclic clause structure.
- 11.
It is always possible to map percepts to smaller subsets such that the ability to discriminate ‘difficult areas’ is lost, and falsifying action possibilities are no longer perceived.
- 12.
However, this paper does not necessarily represent the opinion of the European Community, and the European Community is not responsible for any use which may be made of its contents.
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Acknowledgments
The work presented here was supported by the the European Union, grant DIPLECS (FP 7 ICT project no. 215078)Footnote 12. We also gratefully acknowledge funding from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) (grant EP/F069421/1)
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Windridge, D., Kittler, J. (2010). Perception-Action Learning as an Epistemologically-Consistent Model for Self-Updating Cognitive Representation. In: Hussain, A., Aleksander, I., Smith, L., Barros, A., Chrisley, R., Cutsuridis, V. (eds) Brain Inspired Cognitive Systems 2008. Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology, vol 657. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-79100-5_6
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