Social Development Of Artificial Cognition

Recent years have seen a growing interest in applying insights from developmental psychology to build artificial intelligence and robotic systems. This endeavour, called developmental robotics, not only is a novel method of creating artificially intelligent systems, but also offers a new perspective on the development of human cognition. While once cognition was thought to be the product of the embodied brain, we now know that natural and artificial cognition results from the interplay between an adaptive brain, a growing body, the physical environment and a responsive social environment. This chapter gives three examples of how humanoid robots are used to unveil aspects of development, and how we can use development and learning to build better robots. We focus on the domains of word-meaning acquisition, abstract concept acquisition and number acquisition, and show that cognition needs embodiment and a social environment to develop. In addition, we argue that Spiking Neural Networks offer great potential for the implementation of artificial cognition on robots.