Developing early senses about the world: "Object Permanence" and visuoauditory real-time learning

What "constraints" are exactly wired into the human developmental program? What "constraints" are minimally necessary for a developmental robot? These are open questions. In this paper, we propose a mechanism of developing experience-based priming - predicting the future contexts including sensation and action based on the previous experience - as a powerful "constraint" for developmental robots. We present an architecture that develops this priming capability through realtime online interactions with the environment. We report how our SAIL robot developed a sense of novelty in a well-known "drawbridge" experiment which sheds light on the controversial issue of "object permanence" in psychology. We further show how the proposed priming mechanism enabled SAIL to deal with a very challenging online learning setting: learning the name and property (e.g., size) of dynamically rotating objects through verbal dialogues.